Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
Littlewood [5, Problem 4.19, originally 4] conjectured that there is an absolute constant C > 0 such that, for every sequence of distinct integers n1, n2, n3, …, if
then
Cohen [2] showed
for some absolute constant C, with b = 1/8. Davenport [3] gave a more explicit version of Cohen's proof and improved the estimate to b = 1/4. Pichorides [6] added another refinement to obtain b = ½, and has, more recently, obtained ‖fN‖1>C(log N)1/2. This seems to be the best estimate so far without restriction on the sequences. We shall show that the methods of Davenport and Pichorides may be extended to obtain better results for certain classes of sequences. Specifically, we prove the following theorems.