Geometry and spectra of compact Riemann surfaces (Q5893928)

Originally published as Volume 106 in the series Progress in Mathematics, this version is a reprint of the classic monograph, 1992 edition, consisting of two parts. The first part consists of chapters 1 through 6 and is an introduction to the geometry of compact Riemann surfaces based on hyperbolic geometry and on cutting and pasting. So, in Chapter 1, a number of geometric properties of surfaces which are modelled over the hyperbolic plane are collected. The way of construction of these surfaces being cutting and pasting techniques, the surfaces with piecewise geodesic boundary are included and the existence and uniqueness theorems for geodesics in various types of homotopy classes are proved. Chapter 2 gives an account of hyperbolic trigonometry based on the hyperboloid model: the isometry group acting on the hyperboloid model is used in the first part to obtain the trigonometric formulae of the triangle by comparing matrix elements; such formulae for hexagons and similar configurations are generalized in the second part. Chapters 3 and 6 describe the construction of compact Riemann surfaces based on the pasting of geodesic hexagons and lead to the Fenchel-Nielsen model of the Teichmüller space. Chapters 4 and 5 contain the basic qualitative results about Riemann surfaces: the collar theorem and Bers' theorem on length-controlled pants decompositions. The second part of the book starts with a self-contained introduction to the Laplacian of compact Riemann surfaces. The spectral theorem is proved by using the heat kernel of the hyperbolic plane which is known explicitly. In Chapter 8 the isoperimetric techniques and the famous small eigenvalues of the Laplacian are presented and a connection between the eigenvalue problem and the isoperimetric problem is showed. The rest of the second part of the book is devoted to the question of ``how far and to what extent the geometry of a compact Riemann surface is reflected in the spectrum of the Laplacian'': closed geodesics and Huber's theorem (Chapter 9), Wolpert's theorem (Chapter 10), Sunada's theorem (Chapter 11), examples of isospectral Riemann surfaces (Chapter 12), the size of isospectral families (Chapter 13), and perturbations of the Laplacian in Hilbert space (Chapter 14). An appendix is devoted to curves and isotopies. The book is a very useful reference for researches and also for graduate students interested in the geometry of compact Riemann surfaces of constant curvature \(-1\) and their length and eigenvalue spectra.