Monthly Archives: March 2017

Counting Matrices of Small Trace

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One of the ingredients in a paper that Bram Petri and I submitted in 2016 was a count of integer matrices of determinant 1 with non-negative entries and bounded trace.

Our paper only required an upper bound, but as a number theorist I couldn’t resist the temptation of describing the asymptotics of this function more precisely. In this post we explore do just that, exploring Dirchlet’s hyperbola method along the way.

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Lattice Points in High-Dimensional Spheres

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The Gauss Circle Problem is a classic open problem in number theory concerning the number of lattice points contained in a large circle.

Optimal error bounds are known in these approximations in a generalization of the Gauss Circle Problem to spheres in dimensions four and above.

In this post, I’ll give a purely analytic proof of this result for even dimensions greater than four, and explain why the method fails in the other cases.

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