Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In [3, 4] we showed how the use of a random-walk analogue can be made to yield non-trivial information about the behaviour of certain trigonometric sums in one variable. Our aim here is to show how our method can be adapted to yield similar results for a broad class of trigonometric sums in several variables. Let
be a polynomial in v independent variables with integral coefficients. We choose integers n ≥ 0, d ≥ 1 and p ≥ 2 with p prime, and assume that f(x) has total degree ≤ d + 1. We shall consider the problem of obtaining non-trivial upper bounds for the absolute value of sums of the type
where P = {1, 2, …, p} and f is non-constant.