English

Short addition sequences for theta functions

Number Theory 2018-03-09 v2

Abstract

The main step in numerical evaluation of classical Sl2 (Z) modular forms and elliptic functions is to compute the sum of the first N nonzero terms in the sparse q-series belonging to the Dedekind eta function or the Jacobi theta constants. We construct short addition sequences to perform this task using N + o(N) multiplications. Our constructions rely on the representability of specific quadratic progressions of integers as sums of smaller numbers of the same kind. For example, we show that every generalised pentagonal number c 5 can be written as c = 2a + b where a, b are smaller generalised pentagonal numbers. We also give a baby-step giant-step algorithm that uses O(N/ log r N) multiplications for any r > 0, beating the lower bound of N multiplications required when computing the terms explicitly. These results lead to speed-ups in practice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.06810,
  title  = {Short addition sequences for theta functions},
  author = {Andreas Enge and William Hart and Fredrik Johansson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.06810},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:29:14.356Z