Let $p\equiv 1\hspace{0.2em}{\rm mod}\hspace{0.2em}4$ be a prime number. We use a number field variant of Vinogradov’s method to prove density results about the following four arithmetic invariants: (i) $16$-rank of the class group $\text{Cl}(-4p)$ of the imaginary quadratic number field $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-4p})$; (ii) $8$-rank of the ordinary class group $\text{Cl}(8p)$ of the real quadratic field $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{8p})$; (iii) the solvability of the negative Pell equation $x^{2}-2py^{2}=-1$ over the integers; (iv) $2$-part of the Tate–Šafarevič group $\unicode[STIX]{x0428}(E_{p})$ of the congruent number elliptic curve $E_{p}:y^{2}=x^{3}-p^{2}x$. Our results are conditional on a standard conjecture about short character sums.

In this note, we give an upper bound for the number of elements from the interval $[1,p^{1/4\sqrt{e}+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}]$ necessary to generate the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast }$ with $p$ an odd prime. The general result depends on the distribution of the divisors of $p-1$ and can be used to deduce results which hold for almost all primes.

We show that for any fixed base a, a positive proportion of primes become composite after any one of their digits in the base a expansion is altered; the case where a=2 has already been established by Cohen and Selfridge [‘Not every number is the sum or difference of two prime powers’, Math. Comput.29 (1975), 79–81] and Sun [‘On integers not of the form ±pa±qb’, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.128 (2000), 997–1002], using some covering congruence ideas of Erdős. Our method is slightly different, using a partially covering set of congruences followed by an application of the Selberg sieve upper bound. As a consequence, it is not always possible to test whether a number is prime from its base a expansion without reading all of its digits. We also present some slight generalisations of these results.

A conjecture of Brown and Zassenhaus (see [2]) states that the first log/? primes generate a primitive root (mod p) for almost all primes p. As a consequence of a Theorem of Burgess and Elliott (see [3]) it is easy to see that the first log2p log log4+∊p primes generate a primitive root (mod p) for almost all primes p. We improve this showing that the first log2p/ log log p primes generate a primitive root (mod p) for almost all primes p.