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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, February 7, 2002 - 4:30pm

Craig Sutton

Dartmouth College

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

Abstract: Sunada's method has been used extensively to produce examples of non-isometric yet isospectral pairs of Riemannian manifolds. However, all previous "Sunada-like" examples have been locally isometric and have non-trivial fundamental groups. During this talk we will demonstrate that Sunada's method can yield isospectral normal homogenous spaces which are simply-connetced and locally non-isometric. If time permits we will also show that these examples allow us to comment on a theorem of von Neumann concerning the spectral rigidity of group actions.