English

New observations on primitive roots modulo primes

Number Theory 2020-03-02 v5

Abstract

We make many new observations on primitive roots modulo primes. For an odd prime pp and an integer cc, we establish a theorem concerning g(g+cp)\sum_g(\frac{g+c}p), where gg runs over all the primitive roots modulo pp among 1,,p11,\ldots,p-1, and (p)(\frac{\cdot}p) denotes the Legendre symbol. On the basis of our numerical computations, we formulate 35 conjectures involving primitive roots modulo primes. For example, we conjecture that for any prime pp there is a primitive root g<pg<p modulo pp with g1g-1 a square, and that for any prime p>3p>3 there is a prime q<pq<p with the Bernoulli number Bq1B_{q-1} a primitive root modulo pp. We also make related observations on quadratic nonresidues modulo primes and primitive prime divisors of some combinatorial sequences. For example, based on heuristic arguments we conjecture that for any prime p>3p>3 there exists a Fibonacci number Fk<p/2F_k<p/2 which is a quadratic nonresidue modulo pp; this implies that there is a deterministic polynomial time algorithm to find square roots of quadratic residues modulo a prime p>3p>3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.0290,
  title  = {New observations on primitive roots modulo primes},
  author = {Zhi-Wei Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.0290},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

23 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:04:22.051Z