I’m in San Diego, and it’s charming here. (It’s certainly much nicer outside than the feet of snow in Boston. I’ve apparently brought some British rain with me, though).

Today I give a talk on counting lattice points on one-sheeted hyperboloids. These are the shapes described by
$$ X_1^2 + \cdots + X_{d-1}^2 = X_d^2 + h,$$
where $h > 0$ is a positive integer. The question is: how many lattice points $x$ are on such a hyperboloid with $| x |^2 \leq R$; or equivalently, how many lattice points are on such a hyperboloid and contained within a ball of radius $\sqrt R$ centered at the origin?

I describe my general approach of transforming this into a question about the behavior of modular forms, and then using spectral techniques from the theory of modular forms to understand this behavior. This becomes a question of understanding the shifted convolution Dirichlet series
$$ \sum_{n \geq 0} \frac{r_{d-1}(n+h)r_1(n)}{(2n + h)^s}.$$
Ultimately this comes from the modular form $\theta^{d-1}(z) \overline{\theta(z)}$, where
$$ \theta(z) = \sum_{m \in \mathbb{Z}} e^{2 \pi i m^2 z}.$$

Here are the slides for this talk. Note that this talk is based on chapter 5 of my thesis, and (hopefully) soon a preprint of this chapter ready for submission will appear on the arXiv.