I'm reading "Laplace-Beltrami Eigenfunctions for Deformation Invariant Shape Representation" http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/Fall07/Papers/Rustamov07.pdf
At a certain point the author states "where φi(p) is the value of the eigenfunction φi at the point p."
What does that mean? Cuz if you just multiply the eigenvector φi times the point p = (x, y, z) the only possible result is a Nx3 matrix, where N is the dimension of the eigenvector. However, this doesnt make any sense (I think...it's more likely I just didnt understand it).
Note that it's an eigenfunction not eigenvector. For example an eigenfunction with eigenvalue $\lambda$ of the operator $$\frac{d}{dx}$$ is a solution to $$\frac{d}{dx}f=\lambda f$$ which is $f= e^{\lambda x}$