Hearing the platycosms (Q867381)

One of Milnor's great discoveries was that flat tori based on the Witt lattices \(E_{8}\oplus E_{8}\) and \(D_{16}^{+}\) are isospectral. Over the years, the dimension in which flat tori were known has been gradually reduced from 16 [\textit{J. Milnor}, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 51, 542 (1964; Zbl 0124.31202)] through 12 [\textit{M. Kneser}, Math. Ann. 168, 31--39 (1967; Zbl 0146.05901)], 8 [\textit{Y. Kitaoka}, Arch. Math. Basel 28, 495--497 (1977; Zbl 0361.10019)], 6 and 5 [\textit{J. H. Conway} and \textit{N. J. A. Sloane}, Proc. R. Soc. Lond., Ser. A 436, No. 1896, 55--68 (1992; Zbl 0747.11027)] to 4 [\textit{A. Schiemann}, Math. Ann. 308, No.~3, 507--517 (1997; Zbl 0876.11029)]. It is now known that the dimension cannot be further reduced, in view of a theorem due to [\textit{N. J. A. Schiemann}, Arch. Math. 54, No.~4, 372--375 (1990; Zbl 0697.10018)], namely: There is no non-trivial isospectrality between flat tori of dimension 3. The next simplest candidates are the closed flat manifolds. In the paper under review the authors prove that there is up to scale an unique non-trivial isospectral pair of compact platycosms, i.e., 3-dimensional closed and flat manifold.