Some Generalizations of Ramanujan's Sum

Abstract

Ramanujan's well known trigonometrical sum C(m, n) denned bywhere x runs through a reduced residue system (mod n), had been shown to occur in analytic problems concerning modular functions of one variable, by Poincaré [4]. Ramanujan, independently later, used these trigonometrical sums in his remarkable work on representation of integers as sums of squares [6]. There are various generalizations of C(m, n) in the literature (some also to algebraic number fields); see, for example, [9] which gives references to some of these. Perhaps the earliest generalization to algebraic number fields is due to H. Rademacher [5]. We here consider a novel generalization involving matrices.