One cannot hear the shape of a drum
Carolyn S. Gordon, David L. Webb, Scott A. Wolpert · arXiv (Cornell University) · 1992
We use an extension of Sunada's theorem to construct a nonisometric pair of isospectral simply connected domains in the Euclidean plane, thus answering negatively Kac's question, ``can one hear the shape of a drum?'' In order to construct simply connected examples, we exploit the observation that an orbifold whose underlying space is a simply connected manifold with boundary need not be simply connected as an orbifold.