The influence of the first term of an arithmetic progression

Daniel Fiorilli

Published 2011-04-13Version 1

The goal of this article is to study the discrepancy of the distribution of arithmetic sequences in arithmetic progressions. We will fix a sequence $\A=\{\a(n)\}_{n\geq 1}$ of non-negative real numbers in a certain class of arithmetic sequences. For a fixed integer $a\neq 0$, we will be interested in the behaviour of $\A$ over the arithmetic progressions $a \bmod q$, on average over $q$. Our main result is that for certain sequences of arithmetic interest, the value of $a$ has a significant influence on this distribution, even after removing the first term of the progressions.