English

Badly approximable numbers for sequences of balls

Number Theory 2014-05-30 v2 Classical Analysis and ODEs Dynamical Systems

Abstract

It is a classical result from Diophantine approximation that the set of badly approximable numbers has Lebesgue measure zero. In this paper we generalise this result to more general sequences of balls. Given a countable set of closed dd-dimensional Euclidean balls {B(xi,ri)}i=1,\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty}, we say that αRd\alpha\in \mathbb{R}^{d} is a badly approximable number with respect to {B(xi,ri)}i=1\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty} if there exists κ(α)>0\kappa(\alpha)>0 and N(α)NN(\alpha)\in\mathbb{N} such that αB(xi,κ(α)ri)\alpha\notin B(x_{i},\kappa(\alpha)r_{i}) for all iN(α)i\geq N(\alpha). Under natural conditions on the set of balls, we prove that the set of badly approximable numbers with respect to {B(xi,ri)}i=1\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty} has Lebesgue measure zero. Moreover, our approach yields a new proof that the set of badly approximable numbers has Lebesgue measure zero.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.5762,
  title  = {Badly approximable numbers for sequences of balls},
  author = {Simon Baker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.5762},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

7 pages. After completing this paper the author was made aware of a result due to Cassels. We now know that the work done in this paper is in fact a reasonably straightforward consequence of this result

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:21:00.644Z