Carolyn S. Gordon

Carolyn Sue Gordon ( born December 26, 1950 in Charleston, West Virginia) is an American mathematician who deals with differential geometry. She is particularly known for his contributions to inverse spectral theory.

Gordon studied mathematics at Purdue University in 1979 and his doctorate at Washington University at Edward Nathan Wilson ( on isometry groups of homogeneous manifolds ). After that, she was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Technion in Haifa, was at Lehigh University and Washington University before 1992 went to Dartmouth College, where she is a professor of mathematics.

Gordon dealt with Riemannian geometry, and there especially with spectral problems ( that is, the eigenvalues ​​, the spectrum of the Laplacian on Riemannian manifolds ), with the geometry of Lie groups and symmetric spaces and Kähler and symplectic structures on manifolds. She became famous when she was with Scott Wolpert and David Webb an example of two simple two-dimensional continuous manifold, although the same sound spectrum (which is mathematically the spectrum of the Laplacian on these surfaces corresponds to ), but different shape ( isospektrale manifolds ). So they answered a famous question of Mark Kac in 1966 is negative, if one could hear the shape of a drum ( Can one hear the shape of a drum? ). That this was not possible in more than two dimensions ( the actual goal of the question of Kac ) was already known, the question in two dimensions but open. They used a design by Toshikazu Sunada.

Gordon extended the examples isospektraler manifolds later, for example, in hyperbolic space or by specifying isospektraler convex surfaces (her first example was not convex ) in the Euclidean plane. She also found isospektrale closed manifolds which are not locally isometric.

In 1990 she was awarded a Centennial Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society ( AMS). In 2010 she was Noether Lecturer. By David Webb, she received the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America ( MAA) for You can not hear the shape of a drum. In 1999 she was invited speaker at the Joint Meeting of the AMS and the MAA.

She is co-editor of the Journal of Geometric Analysis.