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APPLICATIONS OF LERCH’S THEOREM TO PERMUTATIONS OF QUADRATIC RESIDUES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2019

LI-YUAN WANG
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, People’s Republic of China email wly@smail.nju.edu.cn
HAI-LIANG WU*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, People’s Republic of China email whl.math@smail.nju.edu.cn

Abstract

Let $n$ be a positive integer and $a$ an integer prime to $n$. Multiplication by $a$ induces a permutation over $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}=\{\overline{0},\overline{1},\ldots ,\overline{n-1}\}$. Lerch’s theorem gives the sign of this permutation. We explore some applications of Lerch’s result to permutation problems involving quadratic residues modulo $p$ and confirm some conjectures posed by Sun [‘Quadratic residues and related permutations and identities’, Preprint, 2018, arXiv:1809.07766]. We also study permutations involving arbitrary $k$th power residues modulo $p$ and primitive roots modulo a power of $p$.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2019 Australian Mathematical Publishing Association Inc. 

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11571162).

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