English

Ternary Digits of Powers of Two

Number Theory 2025-11-07 v1

Abstract

The \textit{ternary digits of 2n2^n} are a finite sequence of 0s, 1s, and 2s. It is a natural question to ask whether the frequency of any string of 0s, 1s, and 2s in this sequence approaches the same limit for all strings of the same length, as the exponent nn approaches infinity (\textit{Uniform Distribution in the limit}). Currently the answer to this question is unknown. Even a much weaker conjecture by Erd\"os is still open. But we present computational results (up to n=106n = 10^6) supporting uniform distribution in the limit. In this context, we discuss implications of Benford's Law and a special case of Baker's Theorem. Then we investigate the infinite sequence of ternary digits of log3(2)\log_3(2). There are analogous questions about the distribution of strings of 0s, 1s, and 2s in that sequence. If there is uniform distribution in the limit, then log3(2)\log_3(2) is called \textit{normal to base 3}. In the absence of definitive results, we can offer again computational evidence from the first 10610^6 ternary digits of log3(2)\log_3(2), strongly supporting the conjecture that log3(2)\log_3(2) is normal to base 3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.03861,
  title  = {Ternary Digits of Powers of Two},
  author = {Christian Roettger and Xuyi Ren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03861},
  year   = {2025}
}