Recently, Granville and Soundararajan have made fundamental breakthroughs in the study of character sums. Building on their work and using estimates on short character sums developed by Graham--Ringrose and Iwaniec, we improve the Pólya--Vinogradov inequality for characters with smooth conductor.

With applications in mind we establish a summation formula for the coefficients of a general Dirichlet series satisfying a suitable functional equation. Among a number of consequences we derive a generalization of an elegant divisor sum bound due to F.~V. Atkinson.

Let \(E/\mathbb{Q}\) be an elliptic curve defined by the equation \(y^2=x^3 +ax +b\). For a prime \(p, \linebreak p \nmid\Delta =-16(4a^3+27b^2)\neq 0\), define \[ N_p = p+1 -a_p = |E(\mathbb{F}_p)|. \] As a precursor to their celebrated conjecture, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer originally conjectured that for some constant $c$, \[ \prod_{p \leq x, p \nmid\Delta } \frac{N_p}{p} \sim c (\log x)^r, \quad x \to \infty. \] Let \(\alpha _p\) and \(\beta _p\) be the eigenvalues of the Frobenius at \(p\). Define \[ \tilde{c}_n = \begin{cases} \frac{\alpha_p^k + \beta_p^k}{k}& n =p^k, p \textrm{ is a prime, $k$ is a natural number, $p\nmid \Delta$} . \\ 0 & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases}. \] and \(\tilde{C}(x)= \sum_{n\leq x} \tilde{c}_n\). In this paper, we establish the equivalence between the conjecture and the condition \(\tilde{C}(x)=\mathbf{o}(x)\). The asymptotic condition is indeed much deeper than what we know so far or what we can know under the analogue of the Riemann hypothesis. In addition, we provide an oscillation theorem and an \(\Omega\) theorem which relate to the constant $c$ in the conjecture.

The infinitely divisible distributions on $\mathbb{R}^+$ of random variables $C_t$, $S_t$ and $T_t$ with Laplace transforms $$ \left( \frac{1}{\cosh \sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t, \quad \left( \frac{\sqrt{2\lambda}}{\sinh \sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t, \quad \text{and} \quad \left( \frac{\tanh \sqrt{2\lambda}}{\sqrt{2\lambda}} \right)^t $$ respectively are characterized for various $t>0$ in a number of different ways: by simple relations between their moments and cumulants, by corresponding relations between the distributions and their L\'evy measures, by recursions for their Mellin transforms, and by differential equations satisfied by their Laplace transforms. Some of these results are interpreted probabilistically via known appearances of these distributions for $t=1$ or $2$ in the description of the laws of various functionals of Brownian motion and Bessel processes, such as the heights and lengths of excursions of a one-dimensional Brownian motion. The distributions of $C_1$ and $S_2$ are also known to appear in the Mellin representations of two important functions in analytic number theory, the Riemann zeta function and the Dirichlet $L$-function associated with the quadratic character modulo~4. Related families of infinitely divisible laws, including the gamma, logistic and generalized hyperbolic secant distributions, are derived from $S_t$ and $C_t$ by operations such as Brownian subordination, exponential tilting, and weak limits, and characterized in various ways.