Robert C. Rhoades

Robert C. Rhoades coauthored work extending the study of Maass forms beyond a single eigenfunction equation. With Jeffrey C. Lagarias, he studied polyharmonic Maass forms: functions with the required arithmetic symmetry and growth conditions that are annihilated by a power of a weight-dependent hyperbolic Laplacian, ${\Delta }_k^{m}f=0$. Their paper constructs bases using derivatives of Eisenstein series with respect to a parameter.^[ref]

An elementary analogy explains why taking a power changes the problem. For the derivative operator $D=d/dt$, the function $f(t)=t$ satisfies $D^{2}f=0$ but $Df=1\ne 0$. Thus requiring two applications to give zero allows more functions than requiring one. The arithmetic setting adds essential symmetry and growth restrictions; the analogy alone does not produce a Maass form. The paper shows how these restrictions lead to explicit finite-dimensional spaces, rather than the unrestricted solution sets of a differential equation.^[ref]