Spectral Analysis In Geometry And Number Theory

This volume is an outgrowth of an international conference in honor of Toshikazu Sunada on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The conference took place at Nagoya University, Japan, in 2007. Sunada's research covers a wide spectrum of spectral analysis, including interactions among geometry, number theory, dynamical systems, probability theory and mathematical physics. Readers will find papers on trace formulae, isospectral problems, zeta functions, quantum ergodicity, random waves, discrete geometric analysis, value distribution, and semiclassical analysis. This volume also contains an article that presents an overview of Sunada's work in mathematics up to the age of sixty.

This book gives its readers a unique opportunity to get acquainted with new aspects of the fruitful interactions between Analysis, Geometry, Quantum Mechanics and Number Theory. The present book contains a number of contributions by specialists in these areas as an homage to the memory of the mathematician Erik Balslev and, at the same time, advancing a fascinating interdisciplinary area still full of potential. Erik Balslev has made original and important contributions to several areas of Mathematics and its applications. He belongs to the founders of complex scaling, one of the most important methods in the mathematical and physical study of eigenvalues and resonances of Schrödinger operators, which has been very essential in advancing the solution of fundamental problems in Quantum Mechanics and related areas. He was also a pioneer in making available and developing spectral methods in the study of important problems in Analytic Number Theory.

In 2012, the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques was at the center of many interesting developments in geometric and spectral analysis, with a thematic program on Geometric Analysis and Spectral Theory followed by a thematic year on Moduli Spaces, Extremality and Global Invariants. This volume contains original contributions as well as useful survey articles of recent developments by participants from three of the workshops organized during these programs: Geometry of Eigenvalues and Eigenfunctions, held from June 4-8, 2012; Manifolds of Metrics and Probabilistic Methods in Geometry and Analysis, held from July 2-6, 2012; and Spectral Invariants on Non-compact and Singular Spaces, held from July 23-27, 2012. The topics covered in this volume include Fourier integral operators, eigenfunctions, probability and analysis on singular spaces, complex geometry, Kähler-Einstein metrics, analytic torsion, and Strichartz estimates. This book is co-published with the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.

Classical number theory is developed from scratch leading to geometric discrepancy theory, with Fourier analysis introduced along the way.

Studying the relationship between the geometry, arithmetic and spectra of fractals has been a subject of significant interest in contemporary mathematics. This book contributes to the literature on the subject in several different and new ways. In particular, the authors provide a rigorous and detailed study of the spectral operator, a map that sends the geometry of fractal strings onto their spectrum. To that effect, they use and develop methods from fractal geometry, functional analysis, complex analysis, operator theory, partial differential equations, analytic number theory and mathematical physics.Originally, M L Lapidus and M van Frankenhuijsen 'heuristically' introduced the spectral operator in their development of the theory of fractal strings and their complex dimensions, specifically in their reinterpretation of the earlier work of M L Lapidus and H Maier on inverse spectral problems for fractal strings and the Riemann hypothesis.One of the main themes of the book is to provide a rigorous framework within which the corresponding question 'Can one hear the shape of a fractal string?' or, equivalently, 'Can one obtain information about the geometry of a fractal string, given its spectrum?' can be further reformulated in terms of the invertibility or the quasi-invertibility of the spectral operator.The infinitesimal shift of the real line is first precisely defined as a differentiation operator on a family of suitably weighted Hilbert spaces of functions on the real line and indexed by a dimensional parameter c. Then, the spectral operator is defined via the functional calculus as a function of the infinitesimal shift. In this manner, it is viewed as a natural 'quantum' analog of the Riemann zeta function. More precisely, within this framework, the spectral operator is defined as the composite map of the Riemann zeta function with the infinitesimal shift, viewed as an unbounded normal operator acting on the above Hilbert space.It is shown that the quasi-invertibility of the spectral operator is intimately connected to the existence of critical zeros of the Riemann zeta function, leading to a new spectral and operator-theoretic reformulation of the Riemann hypothesis. Accordingly, the spectral operator is quasi-invertible for all values of the dimensional parameter c in the critical interval (0,1) (other than in the midfractal case when c =1/2) if and only if the Riemann hypothesis (RH) is true. A related, but seemingly quite different, reformulation of RH, due to the second author and referred to as an 'asymmetric criterion for RH', is also discussed in some detail: namely, the spectral operator is invertible for all values of c in the left-critical interval (0,1/2) if and only if RH is true.These spectral reformulations of RH also led to the discovery of several 'mathematical phase transitions' in this context, for the shape of the spectrum, the invertibility, the boundedness or the unboundedness of the spectral operator, and occurring either in the midfractal case or in the most fractal case when the underlying fractal dimension is equal to ½ or 1, respectively. In particular, the midfractal dimension c=1/2 is playing the role of a critical parameter in quantum statistical physics and the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena.Furthermore, the authors provide a 'quantum analog' of Voronin's classical theorem about the universality of the Riemann zeta function. Moreover, they obtain and study quantized counterparts of the Dirichlet series and of the Euler product for the Riemann zeta function, which are shown to converge (in a suitable sense) even inside the critical strip.For pedagogical reasons, most of the book is devoted to the study of the quantized Riemann zeta function. However, the results obtained in this monograph are expected to lead to a quantization of most classic arithmetic zeta functions, hence, further 'naturally quantizing' various aspects of analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry.The book should be accessible to experts and non-experts alike, including mathematics and physics graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, interested in fractal geometry, number theory, operator theory and functional analysis, differential equations, complex analysis, spectral theory, as well as mathematical and theoretical physics. Whenever necessary, suitable background about the different subjects involved is provided and the new work is placed in its proper historical context. Several appendices supplementing the main text are also included.

​​​A memorial conference for Leon Ehrenpreis was held at Temple University, November 15-16, 2010. In the spirit of Ehrenpreis’s contribution to mathematics, the papers in this volume, written by prominent mathematicians, represent the wide breadth of subjects that Ehrenpreis traversed in his career, including partial differential equations, combinatorics, number theory, complex analysis and a bit of applied mathematics. With the exception of one survey article, the papers in this volume are all new results in the various fields in which Ehrenpreis worked . There are papers in pure analysis, papers in number theory, papers in what may be called applied mathematics such as population biology and parallel refractors and papers in partial differential equations. The mature mathematician will find new mathematics and the advanced graduate student will find many new ideas to explore.​A biographical sketch of Leon Ehrenpreis by his daughter, a professional journalist, enhances the memorial tribute and gives the reader a glimpse into the life and career of a great mathematician.