We prove several finite product-sum identities involving the q-binomial coefficient, one of which is used to prove an amazing identity of Gauss. We then use this identity to evaluate certain quadratic Gauss sums and, together with known properties of quadratic Gauss sums, we prove the quadratic reciprocity law for the Jacobi symbol. We end our article with a new proof of Jenkins’ lemma, a lemma analogous to Gauss’ lemma. This article aims to show that Gauss’ amazing identity and the properties of quadratic Gauss sums are sufficient to establish the quadratic reciprocity law for the Jacobi symbol.

Let p be a prime with $p\equiv 1\pmod {4}$ . Gauss first proved that $2$ is a quartic residue modulo p if and only if $p=x^2+64y^2$ for some $x,y\in \Bbb Z$ and various expressions for the quartic residue symbol $(\frac {2}{p})_4$ are known. We give a new characterisation via a permutation, the sign of which is determined by $(\frac {2}{p})_4$ . The permutation is induced by the rule $x \mapsto y-x$ on the $(p-1)/4$ solutions $(x,y)$ to $x^2+y^2\equiv 0 \pmod {p}$ satisfying $1\leq x < y \leq (p-1)/2$ .

Let $p=3n+1$ be a prime with $n\in \mathbb {N}=\{0,1,2,\ldots \}$ and let $g\in \mathbb {Z}$ be a primitive root modulo p. Let $0<a_1<\cdots <a_n<p$ be all the cubic residues modulo p in the interval $(0,p)$ . Then clearly the sequence $a_1 \bmod p,\, a_2 \bmod p,\ldots , a_n \bmod p$ is a permutation of the sequence $g^3 \bmod p,\,g^6 \bmod p,\ldots , g^{3n} \bmod p$ . We determine the sign of this permutation.

For positive integers n and d > 0, let $G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d)$ denote the graph whose vertices are the set of rational points $\mathbb {Q}^n$, with $u,v \in \mathbb {Q}^n$ being adjacent if and only if the Euclidean distance between u and v is equal to d. Such a graph is deemed “non-trivial” if d is actually realized as a distance between points of $\mathbb {Q}^n$. In this paper, we show that a space $\mathbb {Q}^n$ has the property that all pairs of non-trivial distance graphs $G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d_1)$ and $G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d_2)$ are isomorphic if and only if n is equal to 1, 2, or a multiple of 4. Along the way, we make a number of observations concerning the clique number of $G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d)$.

In this paper, we study how small a box contains at least two points from a modular hyperbola $xy\equiv c\;(\text{mod}\;p)$ . There are two such points in a square of side length $p^{1/4+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ . Furthermore, it turns out that either there are two such points in a square of side length $p^{1/6+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ or the least quadratic non-residue is less than $p^{1/(6\sqrt{e})+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ .

Let $\rho :\,{{G}_{Q}}\,\to \,\text{G}{{\text{L}}_{n}}\left( {{Q}_{\ell }} \right)$ be a motivic $\ell $-adic Galois representation. For fixed $m\,>\,1$ we initiate an investigation of the density of the set of primes $p$ such that the trace of the image of an arithmetic Frobenius at $p$ under $\rho $ is an $m$-th power residue modulo $p$. Based on numerical investigations with modular forms we conjecture (with Ramakrishna) that this density equals $1/m$ whenever the image of $\rho $ is open. We further conjecture that for such $\rho $ the set of these primes $p$ is independent of any set defined by Cebatorev-style Galois-theoretic conditions (in an appropriate sense). We then compute these densities for certain $m$ in the complementary case of modular forms of $\text{CM}$-type with rational Fourier coefficients; our proofs are a combination of the Cebatorev density theorem (which does apply in the $\text{CM}$ case) and reciprocity laws applied to Hecke characters. We also discuss a potential application (suggested by Ramakrishna) to computing inertial degrees at $p$ in abelian extensions of imaginary quadratic fields unramified away from $p$.

It is shown that the method of estimation of exponential sums with nonlinear recurring sequences, invented by the authors in a recent series of works, can be applied to estimating sums of multiplicative characters as well. As a consequence, results are obtained about the distribution of power residues and primitive elements in such sequences.