On the zeros of cosine polynomials: solution to a problem of Littlewood

Littlewood in his 1968 monograph "Some Problems in Real and Complex Analysis" [12, Problem 22] poses the following research problem, which appears to be still open: PROBLEM. "If the n j are integral and all different, what is the lower bound on the number of real zeros of j=1N cos(n j )? Possibly N - 1, or not much less." No progress seems to have been made on this in the last half century. We show that this is false. THEOREM. There exists a cosine polynomial j=1N cos(n j ) with the n j integral and all different so that the number of its real zeros in the period [-, ) is O (N 5/6 log N).

On the zeros of cosine polynomials: solution to a problem of Littlewood Academic Article