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Can One Hear...? An Exploration Into Inverse Eigenvalue Problems Related To Musical Instruments, Christine Adams
Can One Hear...? An Exploration Into Inverse Eigenvalue Problems Related To Musical Instruments, Christine Adams
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The central theme of this thesis deals with problems related to the question, “Can one hear the shape of a drum?” first posed formally by Mark Kac in 1966. More precisely, can one determine the shape of a membrane with fixed boundary from the spectrum of the associated differential operator? For this paper, Kac received both the Lester Ford Award and the Chauvant Prize of the Mathematical Association of America. This problem has received a great deal of attention in the past forty years and has led to similar questions in completely different contexts such as “Can one hear the …