For fixed m and a, we give an explicit description of those subsets of ${\mathbb F}_{q}$, q odd, for which both x and $mx+a$ are quadratic residues (and other combinations). These results extend and refine results that date back to Gauss.

Motivated by the recent work of Zhi-Wei Sun [‘Problems and results on determinants involving Legendre symbols’, Preprint, arXiv:2405.03626], we study some matrices concerning subgroups of finite fields. For example, let $q\equiv 3\pmod 4$ be an odd prime power and let $\phi $ be the unique quadratic multiplicative character of the finite field $\mathbb {F}_q$. If the set $\{s_1,\ldots ,s_{(q-1)/2}\}=\{x^2:\ x\in \mathbb {F}_q\setminus \{0\}\}$, then we prove that

$$ \begin{align*}\det[t+\phi(s_i+s_j)+\phi(s_i-s_j)]_{1\le i,j\le (q-1)/2}=\bigg(\frac{q-1}{2}t-1\bigg)q^{{(q-3)}/{4}}.\end{align*} $$

This confirms a conjecture of Zhi-Wei Sun.

Motivated by the work initiated by Chapman [‘Determinants of Legendre symbol matrices’, Acta Arith. 115 (2004), 231–244], we investigate some arithmetical properties of generalised Legendre matrices over finite fields. For example, letting $a_1,\ldots ,a_{(q-1)/2}$ be all the nonzero squares in the finite field $\mathbb {F}_q$ containing q elements with $2\nmid q$, we give the explicit value of the determinant $D_{(q-1)/2}=\det [(a_i+a_j)^{(q-3)/2}]_{1\le i,j\le (q-1)/2}$. In particular, if $q=p$ is a prime greater than $3$, then

$$ \begin{align*}\bigg(\frac{\det D_{(p-1)/2}}{p}\bigg)= \begin{cases} 1 & \mbox{if}\ p\equiv1\pmod4,\\ (-1)^{(h(-p)+1)/2} & \mbox{if}\ p\equiv 3\pmod4\ \text{and}\ p>3, \end{cases}\end{align*} $$

where $(\frac {\cdot }{p})$ is the Legendre symbol and $h(-p)$ is the class number of $\mathbb {Q}(\sqrt {-p})$.

In this paper, we provide a general framework for counting geometric structures in pseudo-random graphs. As applications, our theorems recover and improve several results on the finite field analog of questions originally raised in the continuous setting. The results present interactions between discrete geometry, geometric measure theory, and graph theory.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and study the following graph-theoretic paradigm. Let

$$ \begin{align*}T_Kf(x)=\int K(x,y) f(y) d\mu(y),\end{align*} $$

$f: X \to {\Bbb R}$

$\mu $

$$ \begin{align*}\Lambda_G(f_1,f_2, \dots, f_n)=\int_{x^1, \dots, x^n \in X} \ \prod_{(i,j) \in {\mathcal E}(G)} K(x^i,x^j) \prod_{l=1}^n f_l(x^l) d\mu(x^l),\end{align*} $$

${\mathcal E}(G)$

$\Lambda _G(p_1, \ldots , p_n)$

$C>0$

(0.1)

$$ \begin{align} \Lambda_G(f_1, \dots, f_n) \leq C \prod_{i=1}^n {||f_i||}_{L^{p_i}(X, \mu)} \end{align} $$

$f_i$

$1\le i\le n$

$T_K$

$X={\Bbb F}_q^d$

$K(x^i,x^j)$

$x^i-x^j$

Let G be a semiabelian variety defined over an algebraically closed field K of prime characteristic. We describe the intersection of a subvariety X of G with a finitely generated subgroup of $G(K)$.

Given $A\subseteq GL_2(\mathbb {F}_q)$, we prove that there exist disjoint subsets $B, C\subseteq A$ such that $A = B \sqcup C$ and their additive and multiplicative energies satisfying

$$\begin{align*}\max\{\,E_{+}(B),\, E_{\times}(C)\,\}\ll \frac{|A|^3}{M(|A|)}, \end{align*}$$

where

$$ \begin{align*} M(|A|) = \min\Bigg\{\,\frac{q^{4/3}}{|A|^{1/3}(\log|A|)^{2/3}},\, \frac{|A|^{4/5}}{q^{13/5}(\log|A|)^{27/10}}\,\Bigg\}. \end{align*} $$

$A, B, C\subseteq GL_2(\mathbb {F}_q)$

$$\begin{align*}|AB+C|, ~|(A+B)C|\gg q^4,\end{align*}$$

$|A||B||C|\gg q^{10 + 1/2}$

$Forum Math.$

We study plane curves over finite fields whose tangent lines at smooth $\mathbb {F}_q$-points together cover all the points of $\mathbb {P}^2(\mathbb {F}_q)$.

In this paper, the nilspace approach to higher-order Fourier analysis is developed in the setting of vector spaces over a prime field $\mathbb {F}_p$, with applications mainly in ergodic theory. A key requisite for this development is to identify a class of nilspaces adequate for this setting. We introduce such a class, whose members we call p-homogeneous nilspaces. One of our main results characterizes these objects in terms of a simple algebraic property. We then prove various further results on these nilspaces, leading to a structure theorem describing every finite p-homogeneous nilspace as the image, under a nilspace fibration, of a member of a simple family of filtered finite abelian p-groups. The applications include a description of the Host–Kra factors of ergodic $\mathbb {F}_p^\omega $-systems as p-homogeneous nilspace systems. This enables the analysis of these factors to be reduced to the study of such nilspace systems, with central questions on the factors thus becoming purely algebraic problems on finite nilspaces. We illustrate this approach by proving that for $k\leq p+1$ the kth Host–Kra factor is an Abramov system of order at most k, extending a result of Bergelson–Tao–Ziegler that holds for $k< p$. We illustrate the utility of p-homogeneous nilspaces also by showing that the structure theorem yields a new proof of the Tao–Ziegler inverse theorem for Gowers norms on $\mathbb {F}_p^n$.

Given $E \subseteq \mathbb {F}_q^d \times \mathbb {F}_q^d$ , with the finite field $\mathbb {F}_q$ of order q and the integer $d\,\ge \, 2$ , we define the two-parameter distance set $\Delta _{d, d}(E)=\{(\|x-y\|, \|z-t\|) : (x, z), (y, t) \in E \}$ . Birklbauer and Iosevich [‘A two-parameter finite field Erdős–Falconer distance problem’, Bull. Hellenic Math. Soc. 61 (2017), 21–30] proved that if $|E| \gg q^{{(3d+1)}/{2}}$ , then $ |\Delta _{d, d}(E)| = q^2$ . For $d=2$ , they showed that if $|E| \gg q^{{10}/{3}}$ , then $ |\Delta _{2, 2}(E)| \gg q^2$ . In this paper, we give extensions and improvements of these results. Given the diagonal polynomial $P(x)=\sum _{i=1}^da_ix_i^s\in \mathbb F_q[x_1,\ldots , x_d]$ , the distance induced by P over $\mathbb {F}_q^d$ is $\|x-y\|_s:=P(x-y)$ , with the corresponding distance set $\Delta ^s_{d, d}(E)=\{(\|x-y\|_s, \|z-t\|_s) : (x, z), (y, t) \in E \}$ . We show that if $|E| \gg q^{{(3d+1)}/{2}}$ , then $ |\Delta _{d, d}^s(E)| \gg q^2$ . For $d=2$ and the Euclidean distance, we improve the former result over prime fields by showing that $ |\Delta _{2,2}(E)| \gg p^2$ for $|E| \gg p^{{13}/{4}}$ .

A Sidon set is a subset of an Abelian group with the property that the sums of two distinct elements are distinct. We relate the Sidon sets constructed by Bose to affine subspaces of $ \mathbb {F} _ {q ^ 2} $ of dimension one. We define Sidon arrays which are combinatorial objects giving a partition of the group $\mathbb {Z}_{q ^ 2} $ as a union of Sidon sets. We also use linear recurring sequences to quickly obtain Bose-type Sidon sets without the need to use the discrete logarithm.

We study pencils of hypersurfaces over finite fields $\mathbb {F}_q$ such that each of the $q+1$ members defined over $\mathbb {F}_q$ is smooth.

We analyse the behaviour of the Euclidean algorithm applied to pairs (g,f) of univariate nonconstant polynomials over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ of q elements when the highest degree polynomial g is fixed. Considering all the elements f of fixed degree, we establish asymptotically optimal bounds in terms of q for the number of elements f that are relatively prime with g and for the average degree of $\gcd(g,f)$ . We also exhibit asymptotically optimal bounds for the average-case complexity of the Euclidean algorithm applied to pairs (g,f) as above.

Let $E/\mathbb {Q}$ be an elliptic curve. For a prime p of good reduction, let $r(E,p)$ be the smallest non-negative integer that gives the x-coordinate of a point of maximal order in the group $E(\mathbb {F}_p)$ . We prove unconditionally that $r(E,p)> 0.72\log \log p$ for infinitely many p, and $r(E,p)> 0.36 \log p$ under the assumption of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. These can be viewed as elliptic curve analogues of classical lower bounds on the least primitive root of a prime.

This paper explores the existence and distribution of primitive elements in finite field extensions with prescribed traces in several intermediate field extensions. Our main result provides an inequality-like condition to ensure the existence of such elements. We then derive concrete existence results for a special class of intermediate extensions.

We exhibit a set of generating relations for the modular invariant ring of a vector and a covector for the two-dimensional general linear group over a finite field.

In this paper, we prove some conjectures of K. Stolarsky concerning the first and third moments of the Beatty sequences with the golden section and its square.

We prove character sum estimates for additive Bohr subsets modulo a prime. These estimates are analogous to the classical character sum bounds of Pólya–Vinogradov and Burgess. These estimates are applied to obtain results on recurrence $\bmod \,p$ by special elements.

Consider a quartic $q$-Weil polynomial $f$. Motivated by equidistribution considerations, we define, for each prime $\ell$, a local factor that measures the relative frequency with which $f$$ \bmod \,\ell $ occurs as the characteristic polynomial of a symplectic similitude over ${{\mathbb{F}}_{\ell }}$. For a certain class of polynomials, we show that the resulting infinite product calculates the number of principally polarized abelian surfaces over ${{\mathbb{F}}_{q}}$ with Weil polynomial $f$.