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To test some conjectures made by some colleagues, I need to compute millions of coefficients of non self-dual modular forms, preferably in low weight (say 2 or 3). A form such as this.

For elliptic curves over $\mathbb{Q}$ I can compute millions of coefficients and for newforms given as eta products I can, as well. One example of a non self-dual form we can do is to compute a self-dual form and twist by a character, but we are looking for forms that don't arise in the way.

In Sage and MAGMA I can only compute hundreds of thousands of coefficients of the form linked to above.

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  • $\begingroup$ What algorithms are you using in Sage and Magma? There are several different approaches, and if we knew which ones it might help in starting to look for solutions. $\endgroup$
    – Watson Ladd
    Commented Oct 24, 2015 at 23:12
  • $\begingroup$ If the non-self dual form you seek has quadratic Dirichlet character, there are more tricks one can use. (In particular, eta products will always give modular forms with quadratic character.) Would an example with quadratic character be suitable for your purposes? $\endgroup$
    – Jeremy Rouse
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 2:22
  • $\begingroup$ @WatsonLadd: I'm using the standard modular symbols algorithms. $\endgroup$
    – ncr
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 3:23
  • $\begingroup$ @JeremyRouse: an example with a quadratic character would be fine. $\endgroup$
    – ncr
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 3:24
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    $\begingroup$ @ncr You state "One example ... is to compute a self-dual form and twist by a character, but we are looking for forms that don't arise in this way". But the example you link to at LMFDB.org does arise in this way! Its character, say $\chi$, has a square root in the group of Dirichlet characters mod 17 -- say $\chi = \eta^2$ -- and then the twist $f \otimes \eta^{-1}$ has trivial character; in this case it's a newform of level $\Gamma_0(289)$. $\endgroup$
    – David Loeffler
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 16:43

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One shortcut you could use for computing the level 17 form you link to would be the following. There are exactly 8 Eisenstein series of weight 1 for $\Gamma_1(17)$ and they are all given by completely explicit $q$-expansion formulae (involving sums of divisors, etc). The pairwise products of these series span the space of forms of weight 2. So if $F$ is the form from your link, you can find some finite collection of weight 1 Eisenstein series $f_i, g_i$ and constants $\lambda_i$ such that

$$ F = \sum_i \lambda_i f_i g_i .$$

So if you can compute the $f_i$ and $g_i$ up to the $q^N$ term, which just amounts to computing the divisors of the integers up to $N$ (about 30 seconds in Sage for $N = 10^6$ on my machine), and then evaluate the pairwise products to the same precision (again, this should take a couple of minutes at most in that sort of range), then this will allow you to compute $F$ up to precision $N$.

EDIT. I implemented this algorithm (in Sage), mostly out of curiosity to see how it would perform. See here for the code. It turns out that it doesn't perform too badly: it took 38 minutes to compute the first million coefficients. As an illustration, if $p = 1,000,003$ is the next prime after 1 million, then $$ a_p(F) = 277 \zeta_8^3 + 277 \zeta_8^2 - 109 \zeta_8 + 109. $$

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  • $\begingroup$ 38 minutes for one coefficient is probably too slow to compute millions, isn't it? $\endgroup$
    – Olivier
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 17:15
  • $\begingroup$ @Olivier 38 mins was the time to compute all the coefficients up to $N = p$, not just $a_p$ alone. $\endgroup$
    – David Loeffler
    Commented Oct 27, 2015 at 7:16
  • $\begingroup$ Ah! That's fine then. $\endgroup$
    – Olivier
    Commented Oct 27, 2015 at 9:37
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You might want to try Brandt matrices and lattice methods instead. If you can write your function as a theta series, then the computation of the terms can be done very quickly through multiplication of power series. See http://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.jmsj/1240433920 for an introduction to the theory, and note that $\sum q^{ax^2+by^2+cz^2}=\sum q^{ax^2} \cdot \sum q^{by^2} \cdot \sum q^{cy^2}$, and the product can be evaluated very quickly.

There is a complication given by the fact you want a character, but you can twist theta series to get them to transform with a particular character.

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