Abstract: For over a decade, I have had the privilege to collaborate and learn from internationally acclaimed, Brooklyn-based choreographer Reggie Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group https://www.fistandheelperformancegroup.org/ .  This engagement has given me new practices for teaching and mentoring, widened my sense of where and how mathematical knowledge is held, and surfaced unexplored areas near the heart of mainstream geometry and topology. In this short talk, I'll try to give a quick sense of how this came about, what it's taught me about being a mathematician, and why I think dance and bodies have more to teach us mathematically.

 I am interested in eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplacian. One area that I have been active recently is the inverse spectral problem for plane domains. We would like to know whether the eigenvalues of the Laplacian of a bounded smooth domain determine the shape of the domain. I will report on recent developments in this area.