The Basic Elliptic Equations in an Equilateral Triangle

In his deep and prolific investigations of heat diffusion, Lamé was led to the investigation of the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplace operator in an equilateral triangle. In particular he derived explicit results for the Dirichlet and Neumann cases using an ingenious change of variables. The relevant eigenfunctions are complicated infinite series in terms of his variables. Here we first show that boundary value problems with simple boundary conditions, such as the Dirichlet and the Neumann problems, can be solved in an elementary manner. In particular for these problems, the unknown Neumann and Dirichlet boundary values respectively, can be expressed in terms of a Fourier series. Our analysis is based on the so called global relation, which is an algebraic equation coupling the Dirichlet and the Neumann spectral values on the perimeter of the triangle. As Lamé correctly pointed out, infinite series are inadequate for expressing the solution of more complicated problems, such as mixed boundary value problems. Here we show, utilizing further the global relation, that such problems can be solved in terms of generalized Fourier integrals.