Existence of nontrivial solutions of linear functional equations

Abstract

In this paper we study the functional equation $$\sum_{i=1}^n a_i f(b_i x+c_i h)=0 \quad (x, h \in \mathbb{C})$$ where a i , b i , c i are fixed complex numbers and \({f \colon \mathbb{C} \to \mathbb{C}}\) is the unknown function. We show, that if there is i such that \({b_i / c_i \neq b_j /c_j}\) holds for any \({1 \leq j \leq n, j \neq i}\), the functional equation has a nonconstant solution if and only if there are field automorphisms \({\phi_1, \ldots, \phi_k}\) of \({\mathbb{C}}\) such that \({\phi_1 \cdots \phi_k}\) is a solution of the equation.