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Spectral geometry studies which properties of a Riemannian manifold can be recovered from the spectrum of geometric differential operators, especially the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Explicit spherical harmonics, Fourier series on a flat torus, and isospectral manifolds illustrate three different aspects of the problem.

A class of metrics is spectrally rigid if equality of their specified spectra forces the metrics to be isometric, or, in a deformation version, if continuous isospectral deformations are trivial. The spectrum of a flat torus determines every two-dimensional flat torus up to isometry. The Wolpert generic spectral rigidity theorem is a generic, rather than universal, uniqueness statement.

The lattice theta series of a full-rank Euclidean lattice records the multiset of squared lengths of lattice vectors. The Gaussian form shown here converges for $t>0$. For a flat torus ${\mathbb{R}}^d/\Lambda$, its heat trace is ${\Theta }_{{\Lambda }^{\ast }}(4\pi t)$, by the spectrum of a flat torus. Equal theta series do not in general imply orthogonal equivalence of lattices.

The mapping torus of an order-three rotation of a hexagonal flat torus is a closed orientable flat Riemannian manifold with holonomy $C_3$. A screw rotation through $2\pi /3$ with axial displacement $1/3$, together with the planar lattice, describes its deck group. Its first Betti number is one.

The vector-length multiset of a rank-two Euclidean lattice determines it up to an orthogonal map. Let $a$ be the shortest nonzero length. Removing two copies of each positive integer multiple of $a$ removes one primitive lattice line; the shortest remaining length $b$ is the shortest independent-vector length. Those two vectors form a lattice basis: otherwise a nonzero point in the centred basis parallelogram would be an independent lattice vector of length less than $b$. Lattice-point density determines the covolume $A$. The basis Gram matrix then has diagonal entries $a^2,b^2$ and absolute off-diagonal entry $\sqrt{a^2{b}^2-A^2}$. This proves two-dimensional spectral rigidity for a flat torus through its dual lattice.