Talk:Hearing the shape of a drum

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There is some other material on this. This is pretty general "question" to ask in harmonic analysis. (I say "question" because it needs to be made a bit more precise.) You "hear" the eigenvalues of the Laplacian, and try to "see" what you can say based on the eigenvalues. Things like the Selberg trace formula give some information (in the hyperbolic case), at least relating the length spectrum (lengths of prime geodesics) to the spectral decomposition (set of eigenvalues). It turns out even in this case, you can't "hear the shape of a drum", although I think the counterexample is not so simple. There's some interesting reading on this for the hyperbolic case in Terras' book "Harmonic Analysis on Symmetric Spaces w/ App, Vol 1". Revolver 00:17, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Bullshit Factor

Needs to be removed from this article. Use plain English and provide a glossary of terms.

I don't think there's any "bullshit" here. Links to articles on some standard terms are needed, and are already there. But this is not supposed to be a remedial math article; standard terms are standard. When you gratuitously accuse people of "bullshit" you damage your credibility. Perhaps some parts of the article could be made more comprehensible to non-mathematicians, but that doesn't make them "bullshit". Michael Hardy 01:46, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Despite the rudeness of the anonymous poster above, if we don't construe his words too literally, he has a point: the problem can be posed in the language of "lay people". Accordingly, I have just done a bit of editing. Perhaps more could follow. Michael Hardy 02:34, 31 May 2006 (UTC)