Early History
Cases of particular interest include those for which the space is a compact Riemann surface S. The initial publication in 1956 of Atle Selberg dealt with this case, its Laplacian differential operator and its powers. The traces of powers of a Laplacian can be used to define the Selberg zeta function. The interest of this case was the analogy between the formula obtained, and the explicit formulae of prime number theory. Here the closed geodesics on S play the role of prime numbers.
At the same time, interest in the traces of Hecke operators was linked to the Eichler-Selberg trace formula, of Selberg and Martin Eichler, for a Hecke operator acting on a vector space of cusp forms of a given weight, for a given congruence subgroup of the modular group. Here the trace of the identity operator is the dimension of the vector space, i.e. the dimension of the space of modular forms of a given type: a quantity traditionally calculated by means of the Riemann-Roch theorem.
Read more about this topic: Selberg Trace Formula
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