Related papers: On some power sum problems of Montgomery and Turan

Let $g \geq 3$ be fixed and odd, and for large $q$ let $\chi$ be a primitive Dirichlet character modulo $q$ of order $g$. Conditionally on GRH we improve the existing upper bounds in the P\'{o}lya-Vinogradov inequality for $\chi$, showing…

For any given integer $k\geq 2$ we prove the existence of infinitely many $q$ and characters $ \chi\pmod q$ of order $k$, such that $|L(1,\chi)|\geq (e^{\gamma}+o(1))\log\log q$. We believe this bound to be best possible. When the order $k$…

In 2000, Vu proved that the number of solutions of $x_1^k + \cdots + x_s^k = N$ in an arbitrary box satisfies the expected Hardy--Littlewood upper bound with a power-saving error term, for $s \geq O(8^k k^3)$. We show that one may take…

We improve Montgomery's $\Omega$-results for $|\zeta(\sigma+it)|$ in the strip $1/2<\sigma<1$ and give in particular lower bounds for the maximum of $|\zeta(\sigma+it)|$ on $\sqrt{T}\le t \le T$ that are uniform in $\sigma$. We give similar…

The systematic study of Tur\'an-type extremal problems for edge-ordered graphs was initiated by Gerbner et al. arXiv:2001.00849. They conjectured that the extremal functions of edge-ordered forests of order chromatic number 2 are…

The sum of square roots is as follows: Given $x_1,\dots,x_n \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $a_1,\dots,a_n \in \mathbb{N}$ decide whether $ E=\sum_{i=1}^n x_i \sqrt{a_i} \geq 0$. It is a prominent open problem (Problem 33 of the Open Problems Project),…

Let $G$ be an infinite graph whose vertex set is the set of positive integers, and let $G_n$ be the subgraph of $G$ induced by the vertices $\{1,2, \dots , n \}$. An increasing path of length $k$ in $G$, denoted $I_k$, is a sequence of…

The following problem originated from a question due to Paul Turan. Suppose $\Omega$ is a convex body in Euclidean space $\RR^d$ or in $\TT^d$, which is symmetric about the origin. Over all positive definite functions supported in $\Omega$,…

A classical result of Paley shows that there are infinitely many quadratic characters $\chi\mod{q}$ whose character sums get as large as $\sqrt{q}\log \log q$; this implies that a conditional upper bound of Montgomery and Vaughan cannot be…

Let $f(n)$ denote the maximum sum of the side lengths of $n$ non-overlapping squares packed inside a unit square. We prove that $f(n^2+1) = n$ for all positive integers $n$ if and only if the sum $\sum_{k\geq 1}(f(k^2+1)-k)$ converges. We…

It is shown that the maximum of $|\zeta(1/2+it)|$ on the interval $T^{1/2}\le t \le T$ is at least $\exp\left((1/\sqrt{2}+o(1)) \sqrt{\log T \log\log\log T/\log\log T}\right)$. Our proof uses Soundararajan's resonance method and a certain…

Given positive integers m,n,s,t, let z(m,n,s,t) be the maximum number of ones in a (0,1) matrix of size m-by-n that does not contain an all ones submatrix of size s-by-t. We find a flexible upper bound on z(m,n,s,t) that implies the known…

We prove conjecturally sharp upper bounds for the Dirichlet character moments $\frac{1}{r-1} \sum_{\chi \; \text{mod} \; r} |\sum_{n \leq x} \chi(n)|^{2q}$, where $r$ is a large prime, $1 \leq x \leq r$, and $0 \leq q \leq 1$ is real. In…

Let F(G) be a fixed linear combination of the k extremal eigenvalues of a graph G and of its complement. The problem of finding max{F(G):v(G)=n} generalizes a number of problems raised previously in the literature. We show that the limit…

For each positive integer $n$, let $g_{\mathbb Z}(n)$ be the smallest integer such that if an integral quadratic form in $n$ variables can be written as a sum of squares of integral linear forms, then it can be written as a sum of…

For $f$ a Rademacher or Steinhaus random multiplicative function, we prove that $$ \max_{\theta \in [0,1]} \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}} \Bigl| \sum_{n \leq N} f(n) \mathrm{e} (n \theta) \Bigr| \gg \sqrt{\log N} ,$$ asymptotically almost surely as $N…

We consider sums of the form $$F_\chi(\alpha,\beta;\theta) := \sum_{\alpha p<n\le\beta p}\chi(n)e(n\theta),$$ where $\chi$ is a non-principal Dirichlet character modulo a prime number $p$. We prove that $$ \sqrt p \log \log p \ll \max_{0…

Let m(n) be the number of ordered factorizations of n in factors larger than 1. We prove that for every eps>0 n^{rho} m(n) < exp[(log n)^{1/rho}/(loglog n)^{1+eps}] holds for all integers n>n_0, while, for a constant c>0, n^{rho} m(n) >…

In the subset sum problem we are given n positive integers along with a target integer t. A solution is a subset of these integers summing to t. In this short note we show that for a given subset sum instance there is a proof of size…

We present two short proofs giving the best known asymptotic lower bound for the maximum element in a set of $n$ positive integers with distinct subset sums.