The Planar Steklov Analogue of Kac's Question
Can one hear the shape of a drum, in the Steklov setting and in the plane? No: there exist pairs of noncongruent bounded plane domains with identical Steklov spectra including multiplicities, simply connected, strictly convex, with real-analytic boundaries, and arbitrarily close to a disk in the C-infinity topology.
- Result
- Disproved(see note)
- Status
- Resolved
- AI contribution
- AI co-developed
- Method
- Construction
- Field
- Spectral geometry
- Posed by
- The Steklov analogue of Kac's question, raised in the Girouard-Polterovich problem literature
- Year posed
- 2017
- Years open
- 9y
- Solved
- 2026-08-11
- Model
- ChatGPT
- Vendor
- OpenAI
- Collaborators
- Tao Hu, Jiachen Shi, Quanyu Tang
- Verification
- Unreviewed
- Publication
- Preprint
- Significance
- 25 / 100
- Disclosed cost
- —
- Wikipedia
- No dedicated article
What was actually shown
Strict convexity and real-analytic boundaries are what make this sharp: the classical Gordon-Webb-Wolpert drums are non-convex polygons, so the obvious escape routes are closed off.
What the AI did
The division of labour is set out in the AI statement: the idea of adapting the Sunada construction of Gordon, Webb and Wolpert to the planar Steklov problem "was proposed by the authors". From there, "ChatGPT provided substantial assistance in developing the concrete counterexample construction, including the passage from the orbifold construction to weighted Steklov problems on the disk and their subsequent realization by Euclidean plane domains. It also assisted with several technical arguments." The authors checked, revised and rewrote the arguments.
Verification
A preprint days old, with no independent review.
Source
- PaperarXiv