Pairs of Consecutive Power Residues

Introduction. Until recently none of the numerous papers on the distribution of quadratic and higher power residues was concerned with questions of the following sort: Let k and m be positive integers. According to a theorem of Brauer (1), for every sufficiently large prime p there exist m consecutive positive integers r, r + l , . . . , r + m — 1, each of which is a &th power residue of p. Let r(k, m, p) denote the least such r. What can be said about the behaviour of r(k, m, p) as p varies? In particular, for what values of k and m is r(k, m, p) bounded, and for these values what is its maximum? For a fixed k and m we call a prime exceptional and denote it by p* if there do not exist m consecutive integers each of which is a &th power residue of p*. Set A(k,m) = Max r (k, m, p), where the maximum is taken over all nonexceptional primes p. In a previous paper (4) Lehmer and Lehmer showed that