One cannot hear the shape of a drum

Abstract

We use an extension of Sunada’s theorem to construct a nonisometric pair of isospectral simply connected domains in the Euclidean plane, thus answering negatively Kac’s question, "can one hear the shape of a drum?" In order to construct simply connected examples, we exploit the observation that an orbifold whose underlying space is a simply connected manifold with boundary need not be simply connected as an orbifold.