No label defined (Q4953536)

The paper is an extension of the previous paper by \textit{J. Bukor}, \textit{T. Šalát} and \textit{J. T. Tóth} [Tatra Mt. Math. Publ. 11, 159--165 (1997; Zbl 0978.11003)]. A set \(A\subset {\mathbb R}^+\), the subset of positive real numbers, is called \((R)\)-dense provided the ratio set \(R(A) =\bigl \{\frac {a}{b}\:a,b\in A\bigr \}\) is dense in \({\mathbb R}^+\). In the above mentioned paper there was proved that if \(A\subset {\mathbb N}\), the set of positive integers, then at least one of the sets \(A\), \({\mathbb N}\setminus A\) is \((R)\)-dense. The present paper starts with the following extension of this result. If \(X=\{x_1<x_2<x_3<\}\subset {\mathbb R}^+\) is unbounded such that (1) \(\lim _{n\to \infty} x_{n+1}/x_n=1\), then if the set \(A\subset X\) is not \((R)\)-dense, then \(X\setminus A\) is \((R)\)-dense. It is shown that (1) cannot be omitted. The second main result says that if a sequence \(\{\alpha _n\}_1^\infty \subset {\mathbb R}^+\) satisfies \(\alpha _n=O(n^{3/8})\), and \(\alpha _{n-1}-\alpha _n=O(n^{-\varepsilon})\), then the set \(\{p_1^{\alpha _1},p_2^{\alpha _2},p_3^{\alpha _3},\dots \}\), where \(p_i\) runs over the set of all primes, is \((R)\)-dense. Finally, define \(R^0(A)=A\), and \(R^{n+1}=R(R^n(A))\) for \(n\geq 1\). If \({\mathcal A}_n\), \(n\geq 0\) denotes the set of all \(A\subset {\mathbb N}\) such that \(R^n(A)\) is not dense in \({\mathbb R}^+\), but \(R^{n+1}(A)\) is already dense in \({\mathbb R}^+\), then it is proved in the paper that \({\mathcal A}_n\neq \emptyset \) for each \(n\geq 0\). The paper concludes with a list of open problems. For instance, denote by \(f(k)\) the least positive integer such that the set \(\mathbb N\) can be decomposed into \(f(k)\) pairwise disjoint sets \(A_1,A_2,\dots ,A_{f(k)}\) in such a way that the union of \(k\) arbitrary chosen sets from \(A_1,A_2,\dots ,A_{f(k)}\) is not \((R)\)-dense. Even \(f(2)\) is not known, the authors show that \(5\leq f(2)\leq 7\).