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Joined 2026-09-21 Message
Incoming links: Daniel Ray
Daniel Ray 2026-11-05
Daniel Ray coauthored the 1971 analytic torsion paper with Isadore Singer. The original prints D. B. Ray; the author-hosted account by Singer's former student John Lott explicitly identifies him as Daniel Ray.[ref]
https://math.berkeley.edu/~lott/torsion.pdf. Introduction, p. 17, identifies Daniel Ray and Isadore Singer
Their construction extracts a geometric invariant from spectra of Laplacians on differential forms. A spectral zeta function makes it possible to define a regularized determinant, which contributes to analytic torsion. Their paper establishes metric-independence under its hypotheses and motivates comparison with a combinatorial invariant.[ref]
R-torsion and the Laplacian on Riemannian manifolds by Daniel Ray and Isadore Singer. Introduction, Definition 1.6 and section 2
Isadore Singer 2026-11-05
Isadore Singer connected analysis, topology and differential geometry. With Michael Atiyah, he proved the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, linking the analytic index of an elliptic operator to topological data.[ref]
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/31190. Institutional mathematical account of the joint index theorem
With Daniel Ray, he introduced analytic torsion using spectral information from Laplacians on differential forms. Their construction uses derivatives of spectral zeta functions to regularize otherwise divergent products of eigenvalues. The original paper proved invariance results and proposed equality with combinatorial torsion; that equality was a conjectural step in their paper.[ref]
R-torsion and the Laplacian on Riemannian manifolds by Daniel Ray and Isadore Singer. Introduction, Definition 1.6 and section 2