On a problem in simultaneous Diophantine approximation: Littlewood's conjecture (Q5928897)

Littlewood's conjecture that given any real numbers \(\alpha, \beta\), \(\liminf_{q\to \infty}q\|q\alpha \|\|q\beta \|=0\) \((\|\alpha\|= \min\{|x-k|: k\in\mathbb{Z}\})\) has resisted resolution for many years. The conjecture holds if either \(\alpha\) or \(\beta\) are not badly approximable (\(\alpha\) is badly approximable if \(q\|q\alpha\|\geq c\) for some constant \(c\) and all \(q\in\mathbb{N}\), this is equivalent to the partial quotients in the continued fraction expansion for \(\alpha\) being bounded). It is shown that for each badly approximable \(\alpha\), the set \({\mathbf G} (\alpha)\) of badly approximable numbers satisfying \(\|q_n\beta \|<1/ \log n\) for \(n\in\mathbb{N}\), where \(q_n\) is the denominator of the \(n\)-th convergent for \(\alpha\), has full Hausdorff dimension, i.e., \(\dim{\mathbf G}(\alpha)=1\). Since \(q_n\|q_n\alpha \|\leq 1\), the conjecture holds for such pairs \((\alpha, \beta)\). The authors point out that this approach cannot yield the complete conjecture since it is known that there exist numbers \(\gamma\) say for which \(q_n\|q_n\gamma \|\geq \delta>0\). This is nevertheless the first significant advance since 1955 when Cassels and Swinnerton-Dyer proved the conjecture held for any pair of cubic irrationals in the same cubic field. The result is obtained by establishing the existence of a suitable measure \(\mu\) on the Cantor-type set \(F_N\) of numbers with partial quotients at most \(N\) and invoking the mass distribution principle. The measure needed had been constructed by \textit{R. Kaufman} [Mathematika 27, 262-267 (1980; Zbl 0455.10035)]. The hard part of the proof, which uses the pair-wise independence generalisation of the Borel-Cantelli lemma, is to show that \(\mu(G_N (\alpha)) >0\), where \(G_N(\alpha)= G(\alpha) \cap F_N\). The paper concludes with a nice application of the Davenport-Erdős-LeVeque theorem to prove that for \(\mu\)-almost all \(\beta\), the set \(\{q_n\beta: n\in\mathbb{Z}\}\) is uniformly distributed; whence \(\{\beta\in F_N:\lim \inf_{n\to \infty}\|q_n\beta \|= 0\}\) has \(\mu\)-measure 1 and so Hausdorff dimension 1.