A well-known theorem of Hardy and Littlewood gives a three-term asymptotic formula, counting the lattice points inside an expanding, right triangle. In this paper a generalisation of their theorem is presented. Also an analytic method is developed which enables one to interpret the coefficients in the formula. These methods are combined to give a generalisation of a “heightcounting” formula of Györy and Pethö which itself was a generalisation of a theorem of Lang.

There are two types of quartic normal extensions of the rational field, depending on the Galois group of the generating equation. All such extensions are described here in a uniquely parametrized form.

We speak of rigidity, if partial information about the prime decomposition in an extension of number fields K¦k determines the decomposition law completely (and hence the zeta function ζK), or even fixes the field K itself. Several concepts of rigidity, depending on the degree of information we start from, are introduced and studied. The strongest concept (absolute rigidity) was only known to hold for the ground field and all quadratic extensions. Here a complete list of all Galois quartic extensions which are absolutely rigid is given. For the weaker concept of rigidity, all rigid situations among the fields of degree up to 8 are determined.

Let K be an algebraic number field, [K: Q] = κ є N; only the case κ > 1 is of interest in this paper. Let f be any non-zero ideal in ZK, the ring of integers of K, and let b be any ray-class (modx f) of K. In this paper we answer a question of P. Erdös (private communication) about the “maximum-growth-rate” of the functions

and

the sum here taken over all ray-classes (modx f), while N(a) is the absolute norm of a. Let

and

where, as usual, for x є R, log+ x - log max {1, x}. We prove

THEOREM 1. For every f, b we have