Learning Fricke signs from Maass form Coefficients

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct a data-scientific investigation of Maass forms. We find that averaging the Fourier coefficients of Maass forms with the same Fricke sign reveals patterns analogous to the recently discovered "murmuration" phenomenon, and that these patterns become more pronounced when parity is incorporated as an additional feature. Approximately 43% of the forms in our dataset have an unknown Fricke sign. For the remaining forms, we employ Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to machine learn their Fricke sign, achieving 96% (resp. 94%) accuracy for forms with even (resp. odd) parity. We apply the trained LDA model to forms with unknown Fricke signs to make predictions. The average values based on the predicted Fricke signs are computed and compared to those for forms with known signs to verify the reasonableness of the predictions. Additionally, a subset of these predictions is evaluated against heuristic guesses provided by Hejhal's algorithm, showing a match approximately 95% of the time. We also use neural networks to obtain results comparable to those from the LDA model.