Improving the Burgess bound via Polya-Vinogradov

Abstract

We show that even mild improvements of the Polya-Vinogradov inequality would imply significant improvements of Burgess' bound on character sums. Our main ingredients are a lower bound on certain types of character sums (coming from works of the second author joint with J. Bober and Y. Lamzouri) and a quantitative relationship between the mean and the logarithmic mean of a completely multiplicative function.