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Noncommutative Harmonic and Subharmonic Polynomials and other Noncommutative Partial Differential Equations

Solutions to Laplace's equation are called harmonic functions. Harmonic functions arise in many applications, such as physics and the theory of stochastic processes. Of interest classically are harmonic polynomials, which have a simple classification. Further, the work of Reznick, building on the work of others, namely Sylvester, Clifford, Rosanes, Gundelfinger, Cartan, Maass and Helgason, has led to a classification of all polynomial solutions to a differential equation of arising from a homogeneous polynomial over an algebraically closed field. The definition of harmonicity can be extended to the space of polynomials in free variables using the concept of a noncommutative Laplacian. Given a positive integer $\ell$, the $\ell$-Laplacian of a noncommutative (abbreviated NC) polynomial $p$ in the direction $h$ is defined to be $$ \lap_{\ell}[p,h] := \sum_{i=1}^g \frac{d^{\ell}}{dt^{\ell}} p(x_1,..., x_i + th,..., x_g).$$ A NC polynomial $p$ is said to be $\ell$-harmonic if $\lap_{\ell}[p,h] = 0$. When $\ell = 2$, then the $\ell$-Laplacian is simply called the Laplacian and a $\ell$-harmonic NC polynomial is simply called harmonic. More generally, the concept of a constant coefficient differential equation can be extended to the space of NC polynomials via the NC directional derivative. The main contribution of this paper is to classify the set of $\ell$-harmonic NC polynomials. The result is analogous to the classification of polynomial solutions to a differential equation of the form $q(\partial/\partial x_1, ..., \partial/\partial x_g)y = 0$ given by Reznick. Additionally, this thesis proves new results about NC "subharmonic" polynomials. This work extends results of Helton, McAllaster, and Hernandez on NC harmonic and subharmonic polynomials, which classified solutions for the $\ell = 2$ case in two noncommuting variables $x_1$ and $x_2$.