These are the proceedings of the NSF-CBMS Conference on “Spectral Problems in Geometry and Arithmetic” held at the University of Iowa. The principal speaker was Peter Sarnak, who has been a central contributor to developments in this field. The volume approaches the topic from the geometric, physical, and number theoretic points of view. The remarkable new connections among seemingly disparate mathematical and scientific disciplines have surprised even veterans of the physical mathematics renaissance forged by gauge theory in the 1970s.

Numerical experiments show that the local spacing between zeros of the Riemann zeta function is modelled by spectral phenomena: the eigenvalue distributions of random matrix theory, in particular the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE). Related phenomena are from the point of view of differential geometry and global harmonic analysis. Elliptic operators on manifolds have (through zeta function regularization) functional determinants, which are related to functional integrals in quantum theory. The search for critical points of this determinant brings about extremely subtle and delicate sharp inequalities of exponential type. This indicates that zeta functions are spectral objects--and even physical objects. This volume demonstrates that zeta functions are also dynamic, chaotic, and more.