Number theoretic techniques in the theory of Lie groups and differential geometry

The purpose of this article is to present a survey of our recent results on length commensurable and isospectral locally symmetric spaces. The geometric questions led us to the notion of "weak commensurability" of two Zariski-dense subgroups in a semi-simple Lie group. We have shown that for arithmetic subgroups, weak commensurability has surprisingly strong consequences. Our proofs make use of p-adic techniques and results from algebraic and transcendental number theory.