On Character Sums and Exponential Sums over Generalized Arithmetic Progressions

Abstract

We study upper bounds for sums of Dirichlet characters. We prove a uniform upper bound of the character sum over all proper generalized arithmetic progressions, which generalizes the classical Polya and Vinogradov inequality. Our argument is based on getting an upper bound for the l1 norm of the Fourier coefficients of a generalized arithmetic progression. Our method also applies to give upper bounds for polynomial exponential sums.