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Carolyn S. Gordon is a mathematician and professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College since 1992. She received her Bachelor of Science degree from the Purdue University, then studied at the Washington University, earning her Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics in 1979. Her doctoral advisor was Edward Nathan Wilson and her thesis was on isometry groups of homogeneous manifolds. She completed a postdoc at Technion Israel Institute of Technology and held positions at Lehigh University and Washington University. In 1990 she was awarded an AMS Centennial Fellowship by the American Mathematical Society.
Gordon is most well known for her work in isospectral geometry which concerns hearing the shape of a drum. In 1966 Mark Kac asked whether the shape of a drum could be determined by the sound it makes. John Milnor observed that a theorem due to Witt implied the existence of a pair of 16-dimensional tori that have the same spectrum but different shapes. However, the problem in two dimensions remained open until 1992, when Gordon, with coauthors Webb and Wolpert, constructed a pair of regions in the Euclidean plane that have different shapes but identical eigenvalues. In further work, Gordon and Webb produced isospectral domains in hyperbolic space and convex isospectral domains in the Euclidean plane.
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