A Clean Approach to Rational Cubic Residues

Abstract

In 1958 E. Lehmer found an explicit description of those primes p for which a given prime q is a cubic residue. In this paper we demonstrate that a similar result may be obtained for cubic nonresidues, yielding a cubic character for fixed p that provides an effective means for ascertaining whether or not an arbitrary integer c is a cubic residue modulo p. As an illustration of this technique, we determine whether 1982 is a cubic residue modulo the 131-digit prime p=(3^19+5^82)/4, a question which is essentially impossible to answer with Lehmer's original criterion.