Mikhail Karphukin, Caltech, Eigenvalues of the Laplacian and min-max for the energy functional
SAS 4201The Laplacian is a canonical second order elliptic operator defined on any Riemannian manifold. The study of optimal upper bounds for its eigenvalues is a classical problem of spectral geometry going back to J. Hersch, P. Li and S.-T. Yau. It turns out that the optimal isoperimetric inequalities for Laplacian eigenvalues are closely related to…