Abstract
Among all drum heads of a fixed area, a circular drum head produces the vibration of lowest frequency. The general dimensional analogue of this fact is the Faber-Krahn inequality, which states that balls have the smallest principal Dirichlet eigenvalue among subsets of Euclidean space with a fixed volume. I will discuss new quantitative stability results for the Faber Krahn inequality on Euclidean space, the round sphere, and hyperbolic space, as well as an application to the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula used in free boundary problems. This is based on joint work with Mark Allen and Dennis Kriventsov.