Resumen html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
The main result of this paper is a bound on the distance between the distribution of an eigenfunction of the Laplacian on a compact Riemannian manifold and the Gaussian distribution. If is a random point on a manifold and is an eigenfunction of the Laplacian with -norm one and eigenvalue , then
This result is applied to construct specific examples of spherical harmonics of arbitrary (odd) degree which are close to Gaussian in distribution. A second application is given to random linear combinations of eigenfunctions on flat tori.