Write and . Character orthogonality gives . For , fix the difference . If , there are choices for the two equal pairs. If , any solution has ; fixing this divisor gives a quadratic equation for , hence at most two choices. The subpower bound for the divisor function yields .
The twice-differenced inequality in Weyl differencing reads , with counting triples for which and all four shifted arguments are in . Thus , and for : the product divides , and the remaining equation determines . The Fourier coefficients of are nonnegative counts, with and . Multiply the inequality by and integrate. It follows that , after choosing the divisor-bound exponents small enough.
Cubic Weyl inequality 2026-10-14
If and with , the displayed estimate holds. Twice applying Weyl differencing bounds by . Group by and use the subpower bound for the divisor function. The reciprocal fractional-part sum near a rational bounds the resulting sum by . Take fourth roots, absorbing logarithms into when ; for larger the trivial bound suffices. Leiden lecture notes, Section 7.2 develop this cubic differencing estimate.
Hua's lemma 2026-10-14
For and every , the displayed estimate bounds a mean value of a polynomial exponential sum. For cubes its eighth-moment bound is . It complements pointwise Weyl differencing estimates: a ninth moment over a region is bounded by its supremum there times this eighth moment. Leiden lecture notes, Section 8.1 give the cubic formulation.
Put and let be a real polynomial of degree . A standard form of Weyl inequality is: if and , then for every
The implied constant is uniform in all lower coefficients. For degree one the finite geometric series bound is , where is distance to the nearest integer.
Here is the Weyl differencing proof. Extend by zero outside . Expanding by differences of indices gives a sum of correlations . Repeated Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and this correlation identity yield, after steps, with ,
The interval ensures that every shifted argument remains in . For completeness, the induction is the following: at stage , the factor is and there is a sum over shifts. Squaring, Cauchy-Schwarz over those shifts supplies ; expanding the square of each remaining interval sum introduces the next shift. The new factor is , as asserted for stage .
The final differenced phase is linear, of slope . Zero products contribute to the sum. For nonzero products the finite geometric series bound applies. Grouping by , the subpower bound for the divisor function bounds the number of representations by for any chosen . The divisor input is elementary: for , the number of ordered factorizations of is . For all sufficiently large primes this is bounded factorwise by , and for the finitely many smaller primes the polynomial in is bounded by a constant times . Multiplication gives . Thus
The reduced denominator of is between and . Its approximation error is bounded by a constant depending on times the inverse square of that denominator. Split the -range into blocks of length a sufficiently small fixed multiple of . Within a block the values are separated modulo one by a constant multiple of : rational differences have spacing at least , while the approximation error in a block difference is smaller than half that spacing. At most a bounded number of values occupy each distance interval of width . Summing reciprocals of their ordered distances proves the reciprocal fractional-part sum near a rational estimate
For , the proposed inequality follows from . Otherwise the last display and the differencing estimate give
Choose sufficiently small, absorb the logarithm into a further arbitrarily small power of , and take th roots. This proves the stated Weyl inequality.
For the recurrence assertion, a rational gives an integer with . For irrational , Weyl differencing implies that is an equidistributed sequence modulo one. One way to avoid a rate issue for unusually good rational approximations is to keep a fixed differencing range : the Van der Corput inequality for finite scalar sequences gives, for each nonzero integer , a limsup bound , because every fixed nonzero difference has irrational linear slope and its geometric average tends to zero. Let and apply the Weyl criterion. Hence some always enters the open -neighborhood of zero.
Finally, are open sets covering the compact circle group. A finite subcover has a largest index . That single works for every real . This is uniform square recurrence on the circle; the compactness step gives existence, not an explicit quantitative bound.
For rational , a multiple of its denominator gives exact integer recurrence. For irrational , Weyl differencing and the Weyl criterion give an equidistributed sequence modulo one. Thus every parameter belongs to one of the open sets . Compactness of the circle group gives a finite subcover, hence a bound uniform in ; no explicit rate follows from this compactness step.
Weyl inequality 2026-10-14
For a real degree- polynomial with leading coefficient , , and coprime integers satisfying , the displayed bound applies to its exponential sum over . Repeated Weyl differencing reduces the phase to slope . A geometric-sum estimate, the subpower bound for the divisor function and the reciprocal fractional-part sum near a rational complete the estimate. The arbitrary positive exponent absorbs divisor bounds and logarithms.