In 1945, Siegel showed that the expected value of the lattice-sums of a function over all the lattices of unit covolume in an n-dimensional real vector space is equal to the integral of function. In 2012, Venkatesh restricted the lattice-sum function to a collection of lattices that had a cyclic group of symmetries and proved a similar mean value theorem. Using this approach, new lower bounds on the most optimal sphere packing density in n dimensions were established for infinitely many n.
In the talk, we will outline the development of an analogue of Siegel's mean value theorem over lattices that have a prescribed set of symmetries given by a finite non-commutative group inside the multiplicative subgroup of a division algebra. This approach modestly improves the best known lattice packing bounds in many dimensions. We will also show how such results, and in particular this result is can be made effective (due to a joint work with Vlad Serban).