Abstract. With view to applications, we establish a correspondence between two problems: (i) the problem of finding continuous positive definite extensions of functions F which are defined on open bounded domains Ω in R, on the one hand; and (ii) spectral theory for elliptic differential operators acting on Ω, (constant coefficients.) A novelty in our approach is the use of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space H F computed directly from (Ω, F ), as well as algorithms for computing relevant orthonormal bases in H F .