English

The Quartic Residues Latin Square

Number Theory 2017-01-05 v1

Abstract

We establish an elementary, but rather striking pattern concerning the quartic residues of primes pp that are congruent to 5 modulo 8. Let gg be a generator of the multiplicative group of Zp\mathbb Z_p and let MM be the 4×44\times 4 matrix whose (i+1),(j+1)(i+1),(j+1)-th entry is the number of elements xx of Zp\mathbb Z_p of the form xgk(modp)x\equiv g^k \pmod p where ki(mod4)k\equiv i \pmod 4 and 4x/p=j\lfloor 4x/p \rfloor = j, for i,j=0,1,2,3i,j=0,1,2,3. We show that MM is a Latin square, provided the entries in the first row are distinct, and that MM is essentially independent of the choice of gg. As an application, we prove that the sum in Z\mathbb Z of the quartic residues is p5(M11+2M12+3M13+4M14)\frac{p}5(M_{11}+2M_{12}+3M_{13}+4M_{14}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.00839,
  title  = {The Quartic Residues Latin Square},
  author = {Christian Aebi and Grant Cairns},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.00839},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:40:26.844Z