All About L’viv

Can you hear the shape of a drum?
Mark Kac (pronounced kahts, Polish: Marek Kac, b. 3 August 1914, Krzemieniec, then in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine; d. 26 October 1984, California, USA) was a Polish and American mathematician of Jewish ancestry [1]. His main interest was probability theory. His question “can you hear the shape of a drum?” set off research into spectral theory, with the idea of understanding the extent to which the spectrum allows one to read back the geometry. (In the end, the answer was “no”, in general.) His book of popularisation with Stanislaw Ulam is a minor classic. (more…)