Spectral Geometry

Gudrun talks with Polyxeni Spilioti at Aarhus university about spectral geometry. Before working in Aarhus Polyxeni was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Anton Deitmar at the University of Tübingen. She received her PhD from the University of Bonn, under the supervision of Werner Mueller after earning her Master's at the National and Technical University of Athens (Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Physics). As postdoc she was also guest at the MPI for Mathematics in Bonn, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris and the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics. In her research she works on questions like: How can one obtain information about the geometry of a manifold, such as the volume, the curvature, or the length of the closed geodesics, provided that we can study the spectrum of certain differential operators? Harmonic analysis on locally symmetric spaces provides a powerful machinery in studying various invariants, such as the analytic torsion, as well as the dynamical zeta functions of Ruelle and Selberg.