English

Single radius spherical cap discrepancy via gegenbadly approximable numbers

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2023-09-13 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

A celebrated result of Beck shows that for any set of NN points on Sd\mathbb{S}^d there always exists a spherical cap BSdB \subset \mathbb{S}^d such that number of points in the cap deviates from the expected value σ(B)N\sigma(B) \cdot N by at least N1/21/2dN^{1/2 - 1/2d}, where σ\sigma is the normalized surface measure. We refine the result and show that, when d≢1 (\mboxmod 4)d \not\equiv 1 ~(\mbox{mod}~4), there exists a (small and very specific) set of real numbers such that for every r>0r>0 from the set one is always guaranteed to find a spherical cap CrC_r with the given radius rr for which the result holds. The main new ingredient is a generalization of the notion of badly approximable numbers to the setting of Gegenbauer polynomials: these are fixed numbers x(1,1) x \in (-1,1) such that the sequence of Gegenbauer polynomials (Cnλ(x))n=1(C_n^{\lambda}(x))_{n=1}^{\infty} avoids being close to 0 in a precise quantitative sense.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.00694,
  title  = {Single radius spherical cap discrepancy via gegenbadly approximable numbers},
  author = {Dmitriy Bilyk and Michelle Mastrianni and Stefan Steinerberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.00694},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:45:46.724Z