  Given a Laplace eigenfunction on a surface, we study the distribution of its
extrema on the nodal domains. It is classically known that the absolute value
of the eigenfunction is asymptotically bounded by the 4-th root of the
eigenvalue. It turns out that the number of nodal domains where the
eigenfunction has an extremum of such order, remains bounded as the eigenvalue
tends to infinity.
  We also observe that certain restrictions on the distribution of nodal
extrema and a version of the Courant nodal domain theorem are valid for a
rather wide class of functions on surfaces. These restrictions follow from a
bound in the spirit of Kronrod and Yomdin on the average number of connected
components of level sets.
