Interrogating surface length spectra and quantifying isospectrality (Q1709783)

The paper under review deals with inverse spectral problems for hyperbolic surfaces. In particular, the author is interested in how length spectra relate to the geometry of the surface and aims at providing a quantitative answer to the following problem: ``how many questions do we need to ask a length spectrum in order to determine it completely?'' To clarify the framework, let us assume that we have an unknown length spectrum \(\Lambda\) of a surface of genus \(g\). In order to determine \(\Lambda\), we can ask questions of the type: ``what is the smallest value of \(\Lambda \setminus \mathcal{L}\), where \(\mathcal{L}\) is a finite list of values?''. The main aim of the paper is to understand the minimum number of questions that we need to ask in order to determine \(\Lambda\). The author shows that there exists an explicit universal constant \(A\) such that the length spectrum \(\Lambda\) of a surface of genus \(g\) can be determined by at most \(g^{Ag}\) questions. A (non-sharp) value of \(A\) can be 154. The author also provides a quantitative upper bound on the number of surfaces of a given genus \(g\) that are isospectral but not isometric.