# Tag Archives: gauss circle problem

## Update to Second Moments in the Generalized Gauss Circle Problem

Last year, my coauthors Tom Hulse, Chan Ieong Kuan, and Alex Walker posted a paper to the arXiv called “Second Moments in the Generalized Gauss Circle Problem”. I’ve briefly described its contents before.

This paper has been accepted and will appear in Forum of Mathematics: Sigma.

This is the first time I’ve submitted to the Forum of Mathematics, and I must say that this has been a very good journal experience. One interesting aspect about FoM: Sigma is that they are immediate (gold) open access, and they don’t release in issues. Instead, articles become available (for free) from them once the submission process is done. I was reviewing a publication-proof of the paper yesterday, and they appear to be very quick with regards to editing. Perhaps the paper will appear before the end of the year.

An updated version (the version from before the handling of proofs at the journal, so there will be a number of mostly aesthetic differences with the published version) of the paper will appear on the arXiv on Monday 10 December.1

## A new appendix has appeared

There is one major addition to the paper that didn’t appear in the original preprint. At one of the referee’s suggestions, Chan and I wrote an appendix. The major content of this appendix concerns a technical detail about Rankin-Selberg convolutions.

If $f$ and $g$ are weight $k$ cusp forms on $\mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{Z})$ with expansions $$f(z) = \sum_ {n \geq 1} a(n) e(nz), \quad g(z) = \sum_ {n \geq 1} b(n) e(nz),$$ then one can use a (real analytic) Eisenstein series $$E(s, z) = \sum_ {\gamma \in \mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{Z})_ \infty \backslash \mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{Q})} \mathrm{Im}(\gamma z)^s$$ to recognize the Rankin-Selberg $L$-function $$\label{RS} L(s, f \otimes g) := \zeta(s) \sum_ {n \geq 1} \frac{a(n)b(n)}{n^{s + k – 1}} = h(s) \langle f g y^k, E(s, z) \rangle,$$ where $h(s)$ is an easily-understandable function of $s$ and where $\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle$ denotes the Petersson inner product.

When $f$ and $g$ are not cusp forms, or when $f$ and $g$ are modular with respect to a congruence subgroup of $\mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{Z})$, then there are adjustments that must be made to the typical construction of $L(s, f \otimes g)$.

When $f$ and $g$ are not cusp forms, then Zagier2 provided a way to recognize $L(s, f \otimes g)$ when $f$ and $g$ are modular on the full modular group $\mathrm{SL}(2, \mathbb{Z})$. And under certain conditions that he describes, he shows that one can still recognize $L(s, f \otimes g)$ as an inner product with an Eisenstein series as in \eqref{RS}.

In principle, his method of proof would apply for non-cuspidal forms defined on congruence subgroups, but in practice this becomes too annoying and bogged down with details to work with. Fortunately, in 2000, Gupta3 gave a different construction of $L(s, f \otimes g)$ that generalizes more readily to non-cuspidal forms on congruence subgroups. His construction is very convenient, and it shows that $L(s, f \otimes g)$ has all of the properties expected of it.

However Gupta does not show that there are certain conditions under which one can recognize $L(s, f \otimes g)$ as an inner product against an Eisenstein series.4 For this paper, we need to deal very explicitly and concretely with $L(s, \theta^2 \otimes \overline{\theta^2})$, which is formed from the modular form $\theta^2$, non-cuspidal on a congruence subgroup.

The Appendix to the paper can be thought of as an extension of Gupta’s paper: it uses Gupta’s ideas and techniques to prove a result analogous to \eqref{RS}. We then use this to get the explicit understanding necessary to tackle the Gauss Sphere problem.

There is more to this story. I’ll return to it in a later note.

## Other submission details for FoM: Sigma

I should say that there are many other revisions between the original preprint and the final one. These are mainly due to the extraordinary efforts of two Referees. One Referee was kind enough to give us approximately 10 pages of itemized suggestions and comments.

When I first opened these comments, I was a bit afraid. Having so many comments was daunting. But this Referee really took his or her time to point us in the right direction, and the resulting paper is vastly improved (and in many cases shortened, although the appendix has hidden the simplified arguments cut in length).

More broadly, the Referee acted as a sort of mentor with respect to my technical writing. I have a lot of opinions on technical writing,5 but this process changed and helped sharpen my ideas concerning good technical math writing.

I sometimes hear lots of negative aspects about peer review, but this particular pair of Referees turned the publication process into an opportunity to learn about good mathematical exposition — I didn’t expect this.

I was also surprised by the infrastructure that existed at the University of Warwick for handling a gold open access submission. As part of their open access funding, Forum of Math: Sigma has an author-pays model. Or rather, the author’s institution pays. It took essentially no time at all for Warwick to arrange the payment (about 500 pounds).

This is a not-inconsequential amount of money, but it is much less than the 1500 dollars that PLoS One uses. The comparison with PLoS One is perhaps apt. PLoS is older, and perhaps paved the way for modern gold open access journals like FoM. PLoS was started by group of established biologists and chemists, including a Nobel prize winner; FoM was started by a group of established mathematicians, including multiple Fields medalists.6

I will certainly consider Forum of Mathematics in the future.

Posted in Expository, Math.NT, Mathematics, Warwick | | Leave a comment

## “Second Moments in the Generalized Gauss Circle Problem” (with T. Hulse, C. Ieong Kuan, and A. Walker)

This is joint work with Thomas Hulse, Chan Ieong Kuan, and Alexander Walker. This is a natural successor to our previous work (see their announcements: one, two, three) concerning bounds and asymptotics for sums of coefficients of modular forms.

We now have a variety of results concerning the behavior of the partial sums

$$S_f(X) = \sum_{n \leq X} a(n)$$

where $f(z) = \sum_{n \geq 1} a(n) e(nz)$ is a GL(2) cuspform. The primary focus of our previous work was to understand the Dirichlet series

$$D(s, S_f \times S_f) = \sum_{n \geq 1} \frac{S_f(n)^2}{n^s}$$

completely, give its meromorphic continuation to the plane (this was the major topic of the first paper in the series), and to perform classical complex analysis on this object in order to describe the behavior of $S_f(n)$ and $S_f(n)^2$ (this was done in the first paper, and was the major topic of the second paper of the series). One motivation for studying this type of problem is that bounds for $S_f(n)$ are analogous to understanding the error term in lattice point discrepancy with circles.

That is, let $S_2(R)$ denote the number of lattice points in a circle of radius $\sqrt{R}$ centered at the origin. Then we expect that $S_2(R)$ is approximately the area of the circle, plus or minus some error term. We write this as

$$S_2(R) = \pi R + P_2(R),$$

where $P_2(R)$ is the error term. We refer to $P_2(R)$ as the “lattice point discrepancy” — it describes the discrepancy between the number of lattice points in the circle and the area of the circle. Determining the size of $P_2(R)$ is a very famous problem called the Gauss circle problem, and it has been studied for over 200 years. We believe that $P_2(R) = O(R^{1/4 + \epsilon})$, but that is not known to be true.

The Gauss circle problem can be cast in the language of modular forms. Let $\theta(z)$ denote the standard Jacobi theta series,

$$\theta(z) = \sum_{n \in \mathbb{Z}} e^{2\pi i n^2 z}.$$

Then

$$\theta^2(z) = 1 + \sum_{n \geq 1} r_2(n) e^{2\pi i n z},$$

where $r_2(n)$ denotes the number of representations of $n$ as a sum of $2$ (positive or negative) squares. The function $\theta^2(z)$ is a modular form of weight $1$ on $\Gamma_0(4)$, but it is not a cuspform. However, the sum

$$\sum_{n \leq R} r_2(n) = S_2(R),$$

and so the partial sums of the coefficients of $\theta^2(z)$ indicate the number of lattice points in the circle of radius $\sqrt R$. Thus $\theta^2(z)$ gives access to the Gauss circle problem.

More generally, one can consider the number of lattice points in a $k$-dimensional sphere of radius $\sqrt R$ centered at the origin, which should approximately be the volume of that sphere,

$$S_k(R) = \mathrm{Vol}(B(\sqrt R)) + P_k(R) = \sum_{n \leq R} r_k(n),$$

giving a $k$-dimensional lattice point discrepancy. For large dimension $k$, one should expect that the circle problem is sufficient to give good bounds and understanding of the size and error of $S_k(R)$. For $k \geq 5$, the true order of growth for $P_k(R)$ is known (up to constants).

Therefore it happens to be that the small (meaning 2 or 3) dimensional cases are both the most interesting, given our predilection for 2 and 3 dimensional geometry, and the most enigmatic. For a variety of reasons, the three dimensional case is very challenging to understand, and is perhaps even more enigmatic than the two dimensional case.

Strong evidence for the conjectured size of the lattice point discrepancy  comes in the form of mean square estimates. By looking at the square, one doesn’t need to worry about oscillation from positive to negative values. And by averaging over many radii, one hopes to smooth out some of the individual bumps. These mean square estimates take the form

\begin{align} \int_0^X P_2(t)^2 dt &= C X^{3/2} + O(X \log^2 X) \\ \int_0^X P_3(t)^2 dt &= C’ X^2 \log X + O(X^2 (\sqrt{ \log X})). \end{align}

These indicate that the average size of $P_2(R)$ is $R^{1/4}$. and that the average size of $P_3(R)$ is $R^{1/2}$. In the two dimensional case, notice that the error term in the mean square asymptotic has pretty significant separation. It has essentially a $\sqrt X$ power-savings over the main term. But in the three dimensional case, there is no power separation. Even with significant averaging, we are only just capable of distinguishing a main term at all.

It is also interesting, but for more complicated reasons, that the main term in the three dimensional case has a log term within it. This is unique to the three dimensional case. But that is a description for another time.

In a paper that we recently posted to the arxiv, we show that the Dirichlet series

$$\sum_{n \geq 1} \frac{S_k(n)^2}{n^s}$$

and

$$\sum_{n \geq 1} \frac{P_k(n)^2}{n^s}$$

for $k \geq 3$ have understandable meromorphic continuation to the plane. Of particular interest is the $k = 3$ case, of course. We then investigate smoothed and unsmoothed mean square results.  In particular, we prove a result stated  following.

Theorem

\begin{align} \int_0^\infty P_k(t)^2 e^{-t/X} &= C_3 X^2 \log X + C_4 X^{5/2} \\ &\quad + C_kX^{k-1} + O(X^{k-2} \end{align}

In this statement, the term with $C_3$ only appears in dimension $3$, and the term with $C_4$ only appears in dimension $4$. This should really thought of as saying that we understand the Laplace transform of the square of the lattice point discrepancy as well as can be desired.

We are also able to improve the sharp second mean in the dimension 3 case, showing in particular the following.

Theorem

There exists $\lambda > 0$ such that

$$\int_0^X P_3(t)^2 dt = C X^2 \log X + D X^2 + O(X^{2 – \lambda}).$$

We do not actually compute what we might take $\lambda$ to be, but we believe (informally) that $\lambda$ can be taken as $1/5$.

The major themes behind these new results are already present in the first paper in the series. The new ingredient involves handling the behavior on non-cuspforms at the cusps on the analytic side, and handling the apparent main terms (int his case, the volume of the ball) on the combinatorial side.

There is an additional difficulty that arises in the dimension 2 case which makes it distinct. But soon I will describe a different forthcoming work in that case.