An inverse problem for the heat equation

Abstract

We prove that we can uniquely recover the coefficient of a one dimensional heat equation from a finite set of measurements and provide a constructive procedure for its recovery. The algorithm is based on the well known Gelfand-Levitan-Gasymov inverse spectral theory of Sturm-Liouville operators. By using a hot spot, as a first initial condition, we determine nearly all except maybe a finite number of spectral data. A counting procedure helps detect the number of missing data which is then unraveled by a finite number of measurements. © 2010 American Mathematical Society.