Student Number Theory Seminar

Adam Jelinsky, University of Waterloo

The Completing Technique for sums of periodic complex valued functions

In Iwaniec and Kowalski's book on analytic number theory, they detail what they call the "completing technique" to evaluate bounds on incomplete sums of periodic functions Z^n->C by "completing" it by finding an equivalent complete sum over all Z/qZ. In this talk we will discuss how this completion technique can be used to prove the Polya-Vinogradov inequality, which gives a nearly tight bound on all sums of Dirichlet characters over the interval [N,N+M]. From this we will discuss other applications of this method, and give examples where this method fails to give a bound that is nontrivial.

MC 5403