The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate in a rather general setup how isoperimetric inequalities and lower bounds of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian can be derived from existence of a distance function with controllable

Solving a longstanding problem on equiangular lines, we determine, for each given fixed angle and in all sufficiently large dimensions, the maximum number of lines pairwise separated by the given angle. Fix 0<α<1. Let N_α(d) denote the maximum number of lines through the origin in R^d with pairwise common angle arccos α. Let k denote the minimum number (if it exists) of vertices in a graph whose adjacency matrix has spectral radius exactly (1−α)/(2α). If k<∞, then N_α(d)= ⌊ k(d−1)/(k−1) ⌋ for all sufficiently large d, and otherwise N_α(d)=d+o(d). In particular, N_{1/(2k−1)}(d)= ⌊ k(d−1)/(k−1) ⌋ for every integer k≥2 and all sufficiently large d. A key ingredient is a new result in spectral graph theory: the adjacency matrix of a connected bounded degree graph has sublinear second eigenvalue multiplicity.

We give a solution to the inverse problem (given a prescribed function, find a corresponding group) for large classes of speed, entropy, isoperimetric profile, return probability and Lp-compression functions of finitely generated groups. For smaller classes, we give solutions among solvable groups of exponential volume growth. As corollaries, we prove a recent conjecture of Amir on joint evaluation of speed and entropy exponents and we obtain a new proof of the existence of uncountably many pairwise non-quasi-isometric solvable groups, originally due to Cornulier and Tessera. We also obtain a formula relating the Lp-compression exponent of a group and its wreath product with the cyclic group forp in [1,2].