Related papers: Squares and difference sets in finite fields

We introduce combinatorial principles that characterize strong compactness and supercompactness for inaccessible cardinals but also make sense for successor cardinals. Their consistency is established from what is supposedly optimal.…

The polynomials of degree $\frac{p-1}{2}$ of range sum $p$ was determined in {\tt arXiv:2311.06136 [math.NT]} for large enough primes. We extend this result by reducing the lower bound for the primes to $23$ by introducing a new and…

We show that if {1, b, c, d} is a D(-1) diophantine quadruple with b<c<d and c=1+s^2, then the cases s=p^k, s=2p^k, c=p and c=2p^k do not occur, where p is an odd prime and k is a positive integer. For the integer d=1+x^2, we show that it…

Let $\BZ_p$ be the finite field of prime order $p$ and $A$ be a subset of $\BZ_p$. We prove several sharp results about the following two basic questions: (1) When can one represent zero as a sum of distinct elements of $A$ ? (2) When can…

A finite subset $A$ of an abelian group $G$ is said to be zero-free if the identity element of $G$ cannot be written as a sum of distinct elements from $A$. In this article we study the structure of zero-free subsets of $Z/pZ$ the…

A finite set $A$ of integers is square-sum-free if there is no subset of $A$ sums up to a square. In 1986, Erd\H os posed the problem of determining the largest cardinality of a square-sum-free subset of $\{1, ..., n \}$. Answering this…

We estimate from below the lower density of the set of prime numbers p such that p-1 has a prime factor of size at least p^c, where c lies in between 1/4 and 1/2. We also establish upper and lower bounds on the counting function of the set…

A well-known theorem of Sch\"utte (1963) gives a sharp lower bound for the ratio between the maximum distance and minimum distance between n+2 points in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In this brief note we adapt B\'ar\'any's elegant proof…

In this paper, we construct a special family of cyclic codes, known as quadratic residue codes of prime length \( p \equiv \pm 1 \pmod{44} ,\) \( p \equiv \pm 5 \pmod{44} ,\) \( p \equiv \pm 7 \pmod{44} ,\) \( p \equiv \pm 9 \pmod{44} \)…

The density of primes $p$ such that the class number $h$ of $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-p})$ is divisible by $2^k$ is conjectured to be $2^{-k}$ for all positive integers $k$. The conjecture is true for $1\leq k\leq 3$ but still open for $k\geq 4$.…

If $p_k$ is the k-th prime, the Firoozbakht conjecture states that the sequence $(p_k)^{1/k}$ is strictly decreasing. We use the table of first-occurrence prime gaps in combination with known bounds for the prime-counting function to verify…

In this paper we study the number of special directions of sets of cardinality divisible by $p$ on a finite plane of characteristic $p$, where $p$ is a prime. We show that there is no such a set with exactly two special directions. We…

We develop a theory of $p$-adic continued fractions for a quaternion algebra $B$ over $\mathbb Q$ ramified at a rational prime $p$. Many properties holding in the commutative case can be proven also in this setting. In particular, we focus…

We investigate exponential sums over singular binary quartic forms, proving an explicit formula for the finite field Fourier transform of this set. Our formula shares much in common with analogous formulas proved previously for other vector…

Kusner asked if $n+1$ points is the maximum number of points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ such that the $\ell_p$ distance $(1<p<\infty)$ between any two points is $1$. We present an improvement to the best known upper bound when $p$ is large in terms…

We show that every cubic bridgeless graph with n vertices has at least 3n/4-10 perfect matchings. This is the first bound that differs by more than a constant from the maximal dimension of the perfect matching polytope.

The `upper rank' of a group is the supremum of the (Pr\"{u}fer) ranks of its finite quotients, and for a prime $p$, the `upper $p$-rank' is the supremum of the sectional $p$-ranks of those quotients. The former is finite if and only if the…

Let $p$ be an odd prime and let $m\not\equiv 0\pmod p$ be a rational p-adic integer. In this paper we reveal the connection between quartic residues and the sum $\sum_{k=0}^{[p/4]}\binom{4k}{2k}\frac 1{m^k}$, where $[x]$ is the greatest…

Let f be a cubic polynomial. Then there are infinitely many primes p such that f(p) is square-free.

For a set $A \subset \mathbb{N}$ we characterize in terms of its density when there exists an infinite set $B \subset \mathbb{N}$ and $t \in \{0,1\}$ such that $B+B \subset A-t$, where $B+B : =\{b_1+b_2\colon b_1,b_2 \in B\}$. Specifically,…