Author

Evan Hunter

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

McDonald, Patrick

Area of Concentration

Mathematics with Spanish

Abstract

The first Dirichlet eigenvalue of the Laplace operator is a well known geometric in- variant, as is the volume of a domain. In 1951 Polya and Szego proved an inequality relating these to torsional rigidity, a geometric invariant related to the Laplace op- erator which arises in the theory of elastic bodies. Via the theory of Dirichlet forms we extend the Polya and Szego result to a class of self-adjoint operators associated to stochastic processes.

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