Hasse–Davenport relation

The Hasse–Davenport relations, introduced by Davenport and Hasse (1935), are two related identities for Gauss sums, one called the Hasse–Davenport lifting relation, and the other called the Hasse–Davenport product relation. The Hasse–Davenport lifting relation is an equality in number theory relating Gauss sums over different fields. Weil (1949) used it to calculate the zeta function of a Fermat hypersurface over a finite field, which motivated the Weil conjectures.

Gauss sums are analogues of the gamma function over finite fields, and the Hasse–Davenport product relation is the analogue of Gauss's multiplication formula

${\displaystyle \Gamma (z)\;\Gamma \left(z+{\frac {1}{k}}\right)\;\Gamma \left(z+{\frac {2}{k}}\right)\cdots \Gamma \left(z+{\frac {k-1}{k}}\right)=(2\pi )^{\frac {k-1}{2}}\;k^{1/2-kz}\;\Gamma (kz).\,\!}$

In fact the Hasse–Davenport product relation follows from the analogous multiplication formula for p-adic gamma functions together with the Gross–Koblitz formula of Gross & Koblitz (1979).