We explore a paradigm which ties together seemingly disparate areas in number theory, additive combinatorics, and geometric combinatorics including the classical Waring problem, the Furstenberg-Sárközy theorem on squares in sets of integers with positive density, and the study of triangles (also called $2$-simplices) in finite fields. Among other results we show that if $\mathbb{F}_q$ is the finite field of odd order $q$, then every matrix in $Mat_d(\mathbb{F}_q), d \geq 2$ is the sum of a certain (finite) number of orthogonal matrices, this number depending only on $d$, the size of the matrix, and on whether $q$ is congruent to $1$ or $3$ (mod $4$), but independent of $q$ otherwise.