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.