The purpose of this paper is to investigate efficient representations of the residue classes modulo $q$, by performing sum and product set operations starting from a given subset $A$ of ${\mathbb{Z}}_q$. We consider the case of very small sets $A$ and composite $q$ for which not much seemed known (nontrivial results were recently obtained when $q$ is prime or when log $\left|A\right|\sim logq$). Roughly speaking we show that all residue classes are obtained from a $k$-fold sum of an $r$-fold product set of $A$, where $r\ll logq$ and $logk\ll logq$, provided the residue sets...

We study sums and products in a field. Let $F$ be a field with $\mathrm{ch}\left(F\right)\ne 2$, where $\mathrm{ch}\left(F\right)$ is the characteristic of $F$. For any integer $k\ge 4$, we show that any $x\in F$ can be written as $a_1+\cdots +a_k$ with $a_1,\cdots ,a_k\in F$ and $a_1\cdots a_k=1$, and that for any $\alpha \in F\setminus \left\{0\right\}$ we can write every $x\in F$ as $a_1\cdots a_k$ with $a_1,\cdots ,a_k\in F$ and $a_1+\cdots +a_k=\alpha$. We also prove that for any $x\in F$ and $k\in \{2,3,\cdots \}$ there are $a_1,\cdots ,a_{2k}\in F$ such that $a_1+\cdots +a_{2k}=x=a_1\cdots a_{2k}$.

Let p be an odd prime and let a be a positive integer. In this paper we investigate the sum $\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{{\sum }_{k=0}^{p^a-1}(h{p}^a-1}{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{k\left)\right(2k}{k)/m^k\left(modp²\right)}}$, where h and m are p-adic integers with m ≢ 0 (mod p). For example, we show that if h ≢ 0 (mod p) and $p^a>3$, then $\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{{\sum }_{k=0}^{p^a-1}(h{p}^a-1}{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{k\left)\right(2k}{{k)(-h/2)}^k\equiv ((1-2h)/\left(p^a\right))(1+h({(4-2/h)}^{p-1}-1))\left(modp²\right)}}$, where (·/·) denotes the Jacobi symbol. Here is another remarkable congruence: If $p^a>3$ then $\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{{\sum }_{k=0}^{p^a-1}(p^a-1}{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{k\left)\right(2k}{{k)(-1)}^k\equiv 3^{p-1}(p^a/3)\left(modp²\right)}}$.

We have ${\sum }_{K-G\le k_j\le K+G}{\alpha }_j{H}_j^3\left(\frac{1}{2}\right){\ll }_{ϵ}G{K}^{1+ϵ}$ for $K^{ϵ}\le G\le K,\text{where}{\alpha }_j={\left|{\rho }_j\left(1\right)\right|}^2{(cosh\pi k_j)}^{-1},\text{and}{\rho }_j\left(1\right)$ is the first Fourier coefficient of the Maass wave form corresponding to the eigenvalue ${\lambda }_j=k_j^2+\frac{1}{4}$ to which the Hecke series $H_j\left(s\right)$ is attached. This result yields the new bound $H_j(\frac{1}{2}{\ll }_{ϵ}{k}_j^{\frac{1}{3}+ϵ}.$

The pairs (k,m) are studied such that for every positive integer n we have $1^k+2^k+\cdots +n^k|1^{km}+2^{km}+\cdots +n^{km}$.