No abstract

Montgomery and Soundararajan showed that the distribution of ψpx `Hq ψpxq, for 0 ď x ď N , is approximately normal with mean " H and variance " H logpN {Hq, when N δ ď H ď N 1´δ . Their work depends on showing that sums R k phq of k-term singular series are µ k p´h log h `Ahq k{2 `Ok ph k{2´1{p7kq`ε q, where A is a constant and µ k are the Gaussian moment constants. We study lower-order terms in the size of these moments. We conjecture that when k is odd, R k phq -h pk´1q{2 plog hq pk`1q{2 . We prove an upper bound with the correct power of h when k " 3, and prove analogous upper bounds in the function field setting when k " 3 and k " 5. We provide further evidence for this conjecture in the form of numerical computations.

Packings of equal disks in the plane are known to have density at most π/ √ 12, although this density is never achieved in the square torus, which is what we call the plane modulo the square lattice. We find packings of disks in a square torus that we conjecture to be the most dense for certain numbers of packing disks, using continued fractions to approximate 1/ √ 3 and 2 − √ 3. We also define a constant to measure the efficiency of a packing motived by a related constant due to Markov for continued fractions. One idea is to use the unique factorization property of Gaussian integers to prove that there is an upper bound for the Markov constant for grid-like packings. By way of contrast, we show that an upper bound by Peter Gruber [9,10] for the error for the limiting density of a packing of equal disks in a planar square, which is on the order of 1/ √ N , is the best possible, whereas for our examples for the square torus, the error for the limiting density is on the order of 1/N , where N is the number of packing disks.

Cools, Draisma, Payne, and Robeva proved that generic metric graphs that are "paths of loops" are Brill-Noether general. We show that Brill-Noether generality does not hold for "trees of loops": the only trees of loops that are Brill-Noether general are paths of loops. We study various notions of generality and examine which of these graphs satisfy them.