Ward's Staut-Clausen problem.
Let p be a prime, ℤₚ be the finite field in p elements, k be a positive integer, and A be the multiplicative subgroup of nonzero kth powers in ℤₚ. The goal of this paper is to determine, for a given positive integer s, a value tₛ such that if |A| ≫ tₛ then every element of ℤₚ is a sum of s kth powers. We obtain , and for s ≥ 6, . For s ≥ 24 further improvements are made, such as and .
We introduce the concept of uniform weighted density (upper and lower) of a subset of , with respect to a given sequence of weights . This concept generalizes the classical notion of uniform density (for which the weights are all equal to 1). We also prove a theorem of comparison between two weighted densities (having different sequences of weights) and a theorem of comparison between a weighted uniform density and a weighted density in the classical sense. As a consequence, new bounds for the...