We answer Mark Kac’s famous question, “Can one hear the shape of a drum?” in the positive for orbifolds that are 3-dimensional and 4-dimensional lens spaces; we thus complete the answer to this question for orbifold lens spaces in all dimensions. We also show that the coefficients of the asymptotic expansion of the trace of the heat kernel are not sufficient to determine the above results.

Let ${{\Gamma }_{1}}$ and ${{\Gamma }_{2}}$ be Bieberbach groups contained in the full isometry group $G$ of ${{\mathbb{R}}^{n}}$. We prove that if the compact flat manifolds ${{\Gamma }_{1}}\backslash {{\mathbb{R}}^{n}}$ and ${{\Gamma }_{2}}\backslash {{\mathbb{R}}^{n}}$ are strongly isospectral, then the Bieberbach groups ${{\Gamma }_{1}}$ and ${{\Gamma }_{2}}$ are representation equivalent; that is, the right regular representations ${{L}^{2}}\left( {{\Gamma }_{1}}\backslash G \right)$ and ${{L}^{2}}\left( {{\Gamma }_{2}}\backslash G \right)$ are unitarily equivalent.

We construct a Laplace isospectral deformation of metrics on an orbifold quotient of a nilmanifold. Each orbifold in the deformation contains singular points with order two isotropy. Isospectrality is obtained by modifying a generalization of Sunada's theorem due to DeTurck and Gordon.

We show that for compact orientable hyperbolic orbisurfaces, the Laplace spectrum determines the length spectrum as well as the number of singular points of a given order. The converse also holds, giving a full generalization of Huber's theorem to the setting of compact orientable hyperbolic orbisurfaces.

A sharp upper bound on the first ${{S}^{1}}$ invariant eigenvalue of the Laplacian for ${{S}^{1}}$ invariant metrics on ${{S}^{2}}$ is used to find obstructions to the existence of ${{S}^{1}}$ equivariant isometric embeddings of such metrics in (${{\mathbb{R}}^{3}}$, can). As a corollary we prove: If the first four distinct eigenvalues have even multiplicities then the metric cannot be equivariantly, isometrically embedded in (${{\mathbb{R}}^{3}}$, can). This leads to generalizations of some classical results in the theory of surfaces.