Corentin Fierobe, "Can One Hear the Shape of a Billiard Table ?"

jeudi 5 nov. 2026, 10:30 → 12:30 Europe/Paris

Billiards provide a model for the motion of a light ray reflecting off the boundary of a cavity, with the geometry of the table determining the dynamics. Inspired by questions of spectral geometry, most famously Kac’s “Can one hear the shape of a drum?”, and by rigidity problems for geodesic flows, the spectral rigidity problem for billiards asks whether a table’s shape can be recovered from its length spectrum, the collection of lengths of its periodic billiard trajectories. In this talk, I will introduce the problem and present recent results on spectral rigidity for billiard tables