We prove convergence in norm and pointwise almost everywhere on $L^p$, $p\in (1,\infty )$, for certain multi-parameter polynomial ergodic averages by establishing the corresponding multi-parameter maximal and oscillation inequalities. Our result, in particular, gives an affirmative answer to a multi-parameter variant of the Bellow–Furstenberg problem. This paper is also the first systematic treatment of multi-parameter oscillation semi-norms which allows an efficient handling of multi-parameter pointwise convergence problems with arithmetic features. The methods of proof of our main result develop estimates for multi-parameter exponential sums, as well as introduce new ideas from the so-called multi-parameter circle method in the context of the geometry of backwards Newton diagrams that are dictated by the shape of the polynomials defining our ergodic averages.

We prove discrete restriction estimates for a broad class of hypersurfaces arising in seminal work of Birch. To do so, we use a variant of Bourgain’s arithmetic version of the Tomas–Stein method and Magyar’s decomposition of the Fourier transform of the indicator function of the integer points on a hypersurface.

We consider families of exponential sums indexed by a subgroup of invertible classes modulo some prime power q. For fixed d, we restrict to moduli q so that there is a unique subgroup of invertible classes modulo q of order d. We study distribution properties of these families of sums as q grows and we establish equidistribution results in some regions of the complex plane which are described as the image of a multi-dimensional torus via an explicit Laurent polynomial. In some cases, the region of equidistribution can be interpreted as the one delimited by a hypocycloid, or as a Minkowski sum of such regions.

We obtain new bounds on short Weil sums over small multiplicative subgroups of prime finite fields which remain nontrivial in the range the classical Weil bound is already trivial. The method we use is a blend of techniques coming from algebraic geometry and additive combinatorics.

Let $f(X) \in {\mathbb Z}[X]$ be a polynomial of degree $d \ge 2$ without multiple roots and let ${\mathcal F}(N)$ be the set of Farey fractions of order N. We use bounds for some new character sums and the square-sieve to obtain upper bounds, pointwise and on average, on the number of fields ${\mathbb Q}(\sqrt {f(r)})$ for $r\in {\mathcal F}(N)$, with a given discriminant.

We use bounds of character sums and some combinatorial arguments to show the abundance of very smooth numbers which also have very few nonzero binary digits.

We present some results related to Zilber’s Exponential-Algebraic Closedness Conjecture, showing that various systems of equations involving algebraic operations and certain analytic functions admit solutions in the complex numbers. These results are inspired by Zilber’s theorems on raising to powers.

We show that algebraic varieties which split as a product of a linear subspace of an additive group and an algebraic subvariety of a multiplicative group intersect the graph of the exponential function, provided that they satisfy Zilber’s freeness and rotundity conditions, using techniques from tropical geometry.

We then move on to prove a similar theorem, establishing that varieties which split as a product of a linear subspace and a subvariety of an abelian variety A intersect the graph of the exponential map of A (again under the analogues of the freeness and rotundity conditions). The proof uses homology and cohomology of manifolds.

Finally, we show that the graph of the modular j-function intersects varieties which satisfy freeness and broadness and split as a product of a Möbius subvariety of a power of the upper-half plane and a complex algebraic variety, using Ratner’s orbit closure theorem to study the images under j of Möbius varieties.

Abstract prepared by Francesco Paolo Gallinaro

E-mail: francesco.gallinaro@mathematik.uni-freiburg.de

URL: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/31077/

We study the double character sum $\sum \limits _{\substack {m\leq X,\\m\mathrm {\ odd}}}\sum \limits _{\substack {n\leq Y,\\n\mathrm {\ odd}}}\left (\frac {m}{n}\right )$ and its smoothly weighted counterpart. An asymptotic formula with power saving error term was obtained by Conrey, Farmer, and Soundararajan by applying the Poisson summation formula. The result is interesting because the main term involves a non-smooth function. In this paper, we apply the inverse Mellin transform twice and study the resulting double integral that involves a double Dirichlet series. This method has two advantages—it leads to a better error term, and the surprising main term naturally arises from three residues of the double Dirichlet series.

Let $[t]$ be the integral part of the real number t and let $\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}$ be the characteristic function of the primes. Denote by $\pi _{\mathcal {S}}(x)$ the number of primes in the floor function set $\mathcal {S}(x) := \{[{x}/{n}] : 1\leqslant n\leqslant x\}$ and by $S_{\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}}(x)$ the number of primes in the sequence $\{[{x}/{n}]\}_{n\geqslant 1}$. Improving a result of Heyman [‘Primes in floor function sets’, Integers 22 (2022), Article no. A59], we show

$$ \begin{align*} \pi_{\mathcal{S}}(x) = \int_2^{\sqrt{x}} \frac{d t}{\log t} + \int_2^{\sqrt{x}} \frac{d t}{\log(x/t)} + O(\sqrt{x}\,\mathrm{e}^{-c(\log x)^{3/5}(\log\log x)^{-1/5}}) \quad\mbox{and}\quad S_{\mathbb{1}_{{\mathbb P}}}(x) = C_{\mathbb{1}_{{\mathbb P}}} x + O_{\varepsilon}(x^{9/19+\varepsilon}) \end{align*} $$

for $x\to \infty $, where $C_{\mathbb {1}_{{\mathbb P}}} := \sum _{p} {1}/{p(p+1)}$, $c>0$ is a positive constant and $\varepsilon $ is an arbitrarily small positive number.

We prove several finite product-sum identities involving the q-binomial coefficient, one of which is used to prove an amazing identity of Gauss. We then use this identity to evaluate certain quadratic Gauss sums and, together with known properties of quadratic Gauss sums, we prove the quadratic reciprocity law for the Jacobi symbol. We end our article with a new proof of Jenkins’ lemma, a lemma analogous to Gauss’ lemma. This article aims to show that Gauss’ amazing identity and the properties of quadratic Gauss sums are sufficient to establish the quadratic reciprocity law for the Jacobi symbol.

Let $\mathbb {T}$ be the unit circle and ${\Gamma \backslash G}$ the $3$ -dimensional Heisenberg nilmanifold. We consider the skew products on $\mathbb {T} \times {\Gamma \backslash G}$ and prove that the Möbius function is linearly disjoint from these skew products which improves the recent result of Huang, Liu and Wang [‘Möbius disjointness for skew products on a circle and a nilmanifold’, Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst. 41(8) (2021), 3531–3553].

There has been recent interest in a hybrid form of the celebrated conjectures of Hardy–Littlewood and of Chowla. We prove that for any $k,\ell \ge 1$ and distinct integers $h_2,\ldots ,h_k,a_1,\ldots ,a_\ell $, we have:

$$ \begin{align*}\sum_{n\leq X}\mu(n+h_1)\cdots \mu(n+h_k)\Lambda(n+a_1)\cdots\Lambda(n+a_{\ell})=o(X)\end{align*} $$

for all except $o(H)$ values of $h_1\leq H$, so long as $H\geq (\log X)^{\ell +\varepsilon }$. This improves on the range $H\ge (\log X)^{\psi (X)}$, $\psi (X)\to \infty $, obtained in previous work of the first author. Our results also generalise from the Möbius function $\mu $ to arbitrary (non-pretentious) multiplicative functions.

We investigate norms of spectral projectors on thin spherical shells for the Laplacian on tori. This is closely related to the boundedness of resolvents of the Laplacian and the boundedness of $L^{p}$ norms of eigenfunctions of the Laplacian. We formulate a conjecture and partially prove it.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the properties of spectral and tiling subsets of cyclic groups, with an eye towards the spectral set conjecture [9] in one dimension, which states that a bounded measurable subset of $\mathbb {R}$ accepts an orthogonal basis of exponentials if and only if it tiles $\mathbb {R}$ by translations. This conjecture is strongly connected to its discrete counterpart, namely that, in every finite cyclic group, a subset is spectral if and only if it is a tile. The tools presented herein are refinements of recent ones used in the setting of cyclic groups; the structure of vanishing sums of roots of unity [20] is a prevalent notion throughout the text, as well as the structure of tiling subsets of integers [1]. We manage to prove the conjecture for cyclic groups of order $p^{m}q^{n}$ , when one of the exponents is $\leq 6$ or when $p^{m-2}<q^{4}$ , and also prove that a tiling subset of a cyclic group of order $p_{1}^{m}p_{2}\dotsm p_{n}$ is spectral.

We obtain some improved results for the exponential sum $\sum _{x<n\leq 2x}\Lambda (n)e(\alpha k n^{\theta })$ with $\theta \in (0,5/12),$ where $\Lambda (n)$ is the von Mangoldt function. Such exponential sums have relations with the so-called quasi-Riemann hypothesis and were considered by Murty and Srinivas [‘On the uniform distribution of certain sequences’, Ramanujan J. 7 (2003), 185–192].

We show that the system of equations

$$ \begin{align*} \sum_{i=1}^{s} (x_{i}^{\,j}-y_{i}^{\,j}) = a_{j} \quad (1 \leqslant j \leqslant k) \end{align*} $$

has appreciably fewer solutions in the subcritical range $s < \tfrac 12k(k+1)$ than its homogeneous counterpart, provided that $a_{\ell } \neq 0$ for some $\ell \leqslant k-1$ . Our methods use Vinogradov’s mean value theorem in combination with a shifting argument.

We consider sums involving the divisor function over nonhomogeneous ( $\beta \neq 0$ ) Beatty sequences $ \mathcal {B}_{\alpha ,\beta }:=\{[\alpha n+\beta ]\}_{n=1}^{\infty } $ and show that

$$ \begin{align*} \sum_{n\leq N,\ n\in\mathcal{B}_{\alpha,\beta}}d(n) =\alpha^{-1}\sum_{m\leq N}d(m) +O(N^{1-1/(\tau+1)+\varepsilon}), \end{align*} $$

where N is a sufficiently large integer, $\alpha $ is of finite type $\tau $ and $\beta \neq 0$ . Previously, such estimates were only obtained for homogeneous Beatty sequences or for almost all $\alpha $ .

Let $[t]$ be the integral part of the real number t. We study the distribution of the elements of the set $\mathcal {S}(x) := \{[{x}/{n}] : 1\leqslant n\leqslant x\}$ in the arithmetical progression $\{a+dq\}_{d\geqslant 0}$ . We give an asymptotic formula

$$ \begin{align*} S(x; q, a) := \sum_{\substack{m\in \mathcal{S}(x)\\ m\equiv a \pmod q}} 1 = \frac{2\sqrt{x}}{q} + O((x/q)^{1/3}\log x), \end{align*} $$

which holds uniformly for $x\geqslant 3$ , $1\leqslant q\leqslant x^{1/4}/(\log x)^{3/2}$ and $1\leqslant a\leqslant q$ , where the implied constant is absolute. The special case $S(x; q, q)$ confirms a recent numerical test of Heyman [‘Cardinality of a floor function set’, Integers 19 (2019), Article no. A67].

In this paper, we study lower-order terms of the one-level density of low-lying zeros of quadratic Hecke L-functions in the Gaussian field. Assuming the generalized Riemann hypothesis, our result is valid for even test functions whose Fourier transforms are supported in $(-2, 2)$ . Moreover, we apply the ratios conjecture of L-functions to derive these lower-order terms as well. Up to the first lower-order term, we show that our results are consistent with each other when the Fourier transforms of the test functions are supported in $(-2, 2)$ .