On Zaremba's Conjecture

We discuss several open problems in Diophantine approximation. Among them there are famous Littlewood's and Zaremba's conjectures as well as some new and not so famous problems.

Zaremba's conjecture (1971) states that every positive integer number can be represented as a denominator (continuant) of a finit continued fraction with all partial quotients being bounded by an absolute constant A. Recently (in 2011) several new theorems concerning this conjecture were proved by Bourgain and Kontorovich. The easiest of them states that the set of numbers satisfying Zaremba's conjecture with A = 50 has positive proportion in N. In 2014 the author with D. A. ...

Zaremba's conjecture (1971) states that every positive integer number $d$ can be represented as a denominator (continuant) of a finite continued fraction $\frac{b}{d}=[d_1,d_2,...,d_{k}],$ with all partial quotients $d_1,d_2,...,d_{k}$ being bounded by an absolute constant $A.$ Recently (in 2011) several new theorems concerning this conjecture were proved by Bourgain and Kontorovich. The easiest of them states that the set of numbers satisfying Zaremba's conjecture with A=50 ...

We ask, for which $n$ does there exists a $k$, $1 \leq k < n$ and $(k,n)=1$, so that $k/n$ has a continued fraction whose partial quotients are bounded in average by a constant $B$? This question is intimately connected with several other well-known problems, and we provide a lower bound in the case of B=2.

We prove that any set $A\subset \mathbb{N}$ of positive upper density contains a finite $S\subset A$ such that $\sum_{n\in S}\frac{1}{n}=1$, answering a question of Erd\H{o}s and Graham.

Even though Zaremba's conjecture remains open, Bourgain and Kontorovich solved the problem for a full density subset. Nevertheless, there are only a handful of explicit sequences known to satisfy the strong version of the conjecture, all of which were obtained using essentially the same algorithm. In this note, we provide a refined algorithm using the folding lemma for continued fractions, which both generalizes and improves on the old one. As a result, we uncover new example...

This paper studies the maximal size of product-free sets in Z/nZ. These are sets of residues for which there is no solution to ab == c (mod n) with a,b,c in the set. In a previous paper we constructed an infinite sequence of integers (n_i)_{i > 0} and product-free sets S_i in Z/n_iZ such that the density |S_i|/n_i tends to 1 as i tends to infinity, where |S_i|$ denotes the cardinality of S_i. Here we obtain matching, up to constants, upper and lower bounds on the maximal atta...

Assuming the well-known conjecture that [x,x+x^t] contains a prime for t > 0 and x sufficiently large, we prove: For 0 < r < 1, there exists 0 < s < r < 1, 0 < d < 1, and infinitely many primes q such that if S is a subset of Z/qZ having density at least s, and having the least number of 3-term arithemtic progressions among all sets of density at least s, then S is nearly translation invariant in a very strong sense. Namely, there exists 0 <= b <= q-1 such that |S intersect (...

This paper has been withdrawn by the author; a revised version is part of the author's phd-thesis "Quasi-logarithmic structures" (Zurich, 2007).

For $A \subseteq \mathbb{N}$, the question of when $R(A) = \{a/a' : a, a' \in A\}$ is dense in the positive real numbers $\mathbb{R}_+$ has been examined by many authors over the years. In contrast, the $p$-adic setting is largely unexplored. We investigate conditions under which $R(A)$ is dense in the $p$-adic numbers. Techniques from elementary, algebraic, and analytic number theory are employed in this endeavor. We also pose many open questions that should be of general in...