Analytic number theory and part of the spectral theory ofoperators (differential, pseudo-differential, elliptic,etc.) are being merged under amore general analytic theoryof regularized products of certain sequences satisfying afew basic axioms. The most basic examples consist of thesequence of natural numbers, the sequence of zeros withpositive imaginary part of the Riemann zeta function, andthe sequence of eigenvalues, say of a positive Laplacian...