Problems and results on determinants involving Legendre symbols

TL;DR

This paper explores determinants with entries involving Legendre symbols, proving specific cases and proposing conjectures about their values, connecting number theory, quadratic residues, and algebraic number theory.

Contribution

It provides new explicit determinant formulas for matrices with Legendre symbol entries and introduces conjectures linking these determinants to class numbers of quadratic fields.

Findings

Proved determinant equals 4 for primes p ≡ 3 mod 4.

Formulated conjectures relating determinants to class numbers and quadratic residues.

Connected determinants with algebraic number theory concepts.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate determinants whose entries are linear combinations of Legendre symbols. We deduce some new results in this direction; for example, we prove that for any prime $p\equiv3\pmod4$ we have $$\det\left[x+\left(\frac{j-k}p\right)+\left(\frac jp\right)-\left(\frac kp\right)\right]_{0\le j,k\le(p-1)/2}=4,$$ where $(\frac{\cdot}p)$ is the Legendre symbol. We also pose many conjectures for further research. For example, for any prime $p>3$ we conjecture that \begin{align*}&\ \det\left[\left(\frac{j+k}p\right)+\left(\frac{j-k}p\right)+\left(\frac{jk}p\right)\right]_{1\le j,k\le(p-1)/2} \\=&\ \begin{cases}(\frac 2p)p^{(p-5)/4}&\text{if}\ p\equiv1\pmod4, \\(-1)^{(h(-p)-1)/2}(1-(2-(\frac 2p))h(-p))p^{(p-3)/4}&\text{if}\ p\equiv3\pmod4, \end{cases}\end{align*} where $h(-p)$ is the class number of the imaginary quadratic field $\mathbb Q(\sqrt{-p})$.