We investigate the sums $(1/\sqrt {H}) \sum _{X < n \leq X+H} \chi (n)$, where $\chi $ is a fixed non-principal Dirichlet character modulo a prime q, and $0 \leq X \leq q-1$ is uniformly random. Davenport and Erdős, and more recently Lamzouri, proved central limit theorems for these sums provided $H \rightarrow \infty $ and $(\log H)/\log q \rightarrow 0$ as $q \rightarrow \infty $, and Lamzouri conjectured these should hold subject to the much weaker upper bound $H=o(q/\log q)$. We prove this is false for some $\chi $, even when $H = q/\log ^{A}q$ for any fixed $A> 0$. However, we show it is true for ‘almost all’ characters on the range $q^{1-o(1)} \leq H = o(q)$.

Using Pólya’s Fourier expansion, these results may be reformulated as statements about the distribution of certain Fourier series with number theoretic coefficients. Tools used in the proofs include the existence of characters with large partial sums on short initial segments, and moment estimates for trigonometric polynomials with random multiplicative coefficients.

We prove structural results for measure-preserving systems, called Furstenberg systems, naturally associated with bounded multiplicative functions. We show that for all pretentious multiplicative functions, these systems always have rational discrete spectrum and, as a consequence, zero entropy. We obtain several other refined structural and spectral results, one consequence of which is that the Archimedean characters are the only pretentious multiplicative functions that have Furstenberg systems with trivial rational spectrum, another is that a pretentious multiplicative function has ergodic Furstenberg systems if and only if it pretends to be a Dirichlet character, and a last one is that for any fixed pretentious multiplicative function, all its Furstenberg systems are isomorphic. We also study structural properties of Furstenberg systems of a class of multiplicative functions, introduced by Matomäki, Radziwiłł, and Tao, which lie in the intermediate zone between pretentiousness and strong aperiodicity. In a work of the last two authors and Gomilko, several examples of this class with exotic ergodic behavior were identified, and here we complement this study and discover some new unexpected phenomena. Lastly, we prove that Furstenberg systems of general bounded multiplicative functions have divisible spectrum. When these systems are obtained using logarithmic averages, we show that a trivial rational spectrum implies a strong dilation invariance property, called strong stationarity, but, quite surprisingly, this property fails when the systems are obtained using Cesàro averages.

We show that for any $\varepsilon>0$, the number of monic, reciprocal, length-$5$ integer polynomials that have house at least $1+\varepsilon $ is finite. The proof is algorithmic, and we are consequently able to compute a complete list (not imposing any bound on the degree) of small Mahler measures of length-$5$ polynomials that have house at least $1.01$.

For larger lengths, the analogous finiteness statement is false, as we show by examples. For length $6$ we show that if one also imposes an upper bound for the Mahler measure that is strictly below the smallest Pisot number $\theta = 1.32471\cdots $, and if the length $6$ polynomial is a cyclotomic multiple of an irreducible polynomial, then the number of polynomials with house at least $1+\varepsilon $ is finite.

We pursue these ideas to search opportunistically for small Mahler measures represented by longer polynomials. We find one new small measure.

We give an algorithm that finds all Salem numbers in an interval $[a,b]$ that are the Mahler measure of an integer polynomial of length at most $6$, provided $1<a \le b < \theta $.

Let $b \geqslant 3$ be an integer and C(b, D) be the set of real numbers in [0,1] whose base b expansion only consists of digits in a set $D {\subseteq} \{0,...,b-1\}$. We study how close can numbers in C(b, D) be approximated by rational numbers with denominators being powers of some integer t and obtain a zero-full law for its Hausdorff measure in several circumstances. When b and t are multiplicatively dependent, our results correct an error of Levesley, Salp and Velani (Math. Ann. 338 (2007), 97–118) and generalise their theorem. When b and t are multiplicatively independent but have the same prime divisors, we obtain a partial result on the Hausdorff measure and bounds for the Hausdorff dimension, which are close to the multiplicatively dependent case. Based on these results, several conjectures are proposed.

Fix $\alpha >0$. Then by Fejér's theorem $(\alpha (\log n)^{A}\,\mathrm {mod}\,1)_{n\geq 1}$ is uniformly distributed if and only if $A>1$. We sharpen this by showing that all correlation functions, and hence the gap distribution, are Poissonian provided $A>1$. This is the first example of a deterministic sequence modulo $1$ whose gap distribution and all of whose correlations are proven to be Poissonian. The range of $A$ is optimal and complements a result of Marklof and Strömbergsson who found the limiting gap distribution of $(\log (n)\, \mathrm {mod}\,1)$, which is necessarily not Poissonian.

In this article, we calculate the Birkhoff spectrum in terms of the Hausdorff dimension of level sets for Birkhoff averages of continuous potentials for a certain family of diagonally affine iterated function systems. Also, we study Besicovitch–Eggleston sets for finite generalized Lüroth series number systems with redundancy. The redundancy refers to the fact that each number $x \in [0,1]$ has uncountably many expansions in the system. We determine the Hausdorff dimension of digit frequency sets for such expansions along fibres.

Let $[a_1(x),a_2(x),\ldots ,a_n(x),\ldots ]$ be the continued fraction expansion of $x\in [0,1)$ and $q_n(x)$ be the denominator of its nth convergent. The irrationality exponent and Khintchine exponent of x are respectively defined by

$$ \begin{align*} \overline{v}(x)=2+\limsup_{n\to\infty}\frac{\log a_{n+1}(x)}{\log q_n(x)} \quad \text{and}\quad \gamma(x)=\lim_{n\to\infty}\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}\log a_i(x). \end{align*} $$

We study the multifractal spectrum of the irrationality exponent and the Khintchine exponent for continued fractions with nondecreasing partial quotients. For any $v>2$, we completely determine the Hausdorff dimensions of the sets $\{x\in [0,1): a_1(x)\leq a_2(x)\leq \cdots , \overline {v}(x)=v\}$ and

$$ \begin{align*}\bigg\{x\in[0,1): a_1(x)\leq a_2(x)\leq\cdots, \lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\frac{\log a_1(x)+\log a_2(x)+\cdots+\log a_n(x)}{\psi(n)}=1\bigg\},\end{align*} $$

where $\psi :\mathbb {N}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^+$ is a function satisfying $\psi (n)\to \infty $ as $n\to \infty $.

We prove that any increasing sequence of real numbers with average gap $1$ and Poisson pair correlations has some gap that is at least $3/2+10^{-9}$. This improves upon a result of Aistleitner, Blomer, and Radziwiłł.

For $ \beta>1 $, let $ T_\beta $ be the $\beta $-transformation on $ [0,1) $. Let $ \beta _1,\ldots ,\beta _d>1 $ and let $ \mathcal P=\{P_n\}_{n\ge 1} $ be a sequence of parallelepipeds in $ [0,1)^d $. Define

$$ \begin{align*}W(\mathcal P)=\{\mathbf{x}\in[0,1)^d:(T_{\beta_1}\times\cdots \times T_{\beta_d})^n(\mathbf{x})\in P_n\text{ infinitely often}\}.\end{align*} $$

$ P_n $

$\dim _{\mathrm {H}} W(\mathcal P)$

$\dim _{\mathrm {H}}$

$ P_n $

$\dim _{\mathrm {H}} W(\mathcal P)$

$\dim _{\mathrm {H}} W(\mathcal P)$

We study the exact Hausdorff and packing dimensions of the prime Cantor set, $\Lambda _P$, which comprises the irrationals whose continued fraction entries are prime numbers. We prove that the Hausdorff measure of the prime Cantor set cannot be finite and positive with respect to any sufficiently regular dimension function, thus negatively answering a question of Mauldin and Urbański (1999) and Mauldin (2013) for this class of dimension functions. By contrast, under a reasonable number-theoretic conjecture we prove that the packing measure of the conformal measure on the prime Cantor set is in fact positive and finite with respect to the dimension function $\psi (r) = r^\delta \log ^{-2\delta }\log (1/r)$, where $\delta $ is the dimension (conformal, Hausdorff, and packing) of the prime Cantor set.

We investigate the discrepancy between the distributions of the random variable $\log L (\sigma , f \times f, X)$ and that of $\log L(\sigma +it, f \times f)$, that is,

$$ \begin{align*} D_{\sigma} (T) := \sup_{\mathcal{R}} |\mathbb{P}_T(\log L(\sigma+it, f \times f) \in \mathcal{R}) - \mathbb{P}(\log L(\sigma, f \times f, X) \in \mathcal{R})|, \end{align*} $$

where the supremum is taken over rectangles $\mathcal {R}$ with sides parallel to the coordinate axes. For fixed $T>3$ and $2/3 <\sigma _0 < \sigma < 1$, we prove that

$$ \begin{align*} D_{\sigma} (T) \ll \frac{1}{(\log T)^{\sigma}}. \end{align*} $$

We study the multifractal properties of the uniform approximation exponent and asymptotic approximation exponent in continued fractions. As a corollary, we calculate the Hausdorff dimension of the uniform Diophantine set

$$ \begin{align*} {\mathcal{U}(\hat{\nu})}= &\ \{x\in[0,1)\colon \text{for all }N\gg1,\text{ there exists }n\in[1,N],\\&\ \ \text{ such that }|T^{n}(x)-y| < |I_{N}(y)|^{\hat{\nu}}\} \end{align*} $$

$y\in [0,1)$

We prove the convergence of moments of the number of directions of affine lattice vectors that fall into a small disc, under natural Diophantine conditions on the shift. Furthermore, we show that the pair correlation function is Poissonian for any irrational shift in dimension 3 and higher, including well-approximable vectors. Convergence in distribution was already proved in the work of Strömbergsson and the second author [The distribution of free path lengths in the periodic Lorentz gas and related lattice point problems. Ann. of Math. (2) 172 (2010), 1949–2033], and the principal step in the extension to convergence of moments is an escape of mass estimate for averages over embedded $\operatorname {SL}(d,\mathbb {R})$-horospheres in the space of affine lattices.

Let $[a_1(x),a_2(x),a_3(x),\ldots ]$ be the continued fraction expansion of an irrational number $x\in [0,1)$. We are concerned with the asymptotic behaviour of the product of consecutive partial quotients of x. We prove that, for Lebesgue almost all $x\in [0,1)$,

$$ \begin{align*} \liminf_{n \to \infty} \frac{\log (a_n(x)a_{n+1}(x))}{\log n} = 0\quad \text{and}\quad \limsup_{n \to \infty} \frac{\log (a_n(x)a_{n+1}(x))}{\log n}=1. \end{align*} $$

We also study the Baire category and the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points for which the above liminf and limsup have other different values and similarly analyse the weighted product of consecutive partial quotients.

We show that there is a set $S \subseteq {\mathbb N}$ with lower density arbitrarily close to $1$ such that, for each sufficiently large real number $\alpha $, the inequality $|m\alpha -n| \geq 1$ holds for every pair $(m,n) \in S^2$. On the other hand, if $S \subseteq {\mathbb N}$ has density $1$, then, for each irrational $\alpha>0$ and any positive $\varepsilon $, there exist $m,n \in S$ for which $|m\alpha -n|<\varepsilon $.

We study the Diophantine transference principle over function fields. By adapting the approach of Beresnevich and Velani [‘An inhomogeneous transference principle and Diophantine approximation’, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 101 (2010), 821–851] to function fields, we extend many results from homogeneous to inhomogeneous Diophantine approximation. This also yields the inhomogeneous Baker–Sprindžuk conjecture over function fields and upper bounds for the general nonextremal scenario.

We derive an explicit formula for the N-point correlation $F_N(s)$ of the van der Corput sequence in base $2$ for all $N \in \mathbb {N}$ and $s \geq 0$. The formula can be evaluated without explicit knowledge about the elements of the van der Corput sequence. This constitutes the first example of an exact closed-form expression of $F_N(s)$ for all $N \in \mathbb {N}$ and all $s \geq 0$ which does not require explicit knowledge about the involved sequence. Moreover, it can be immediately read off that $\lim _{N \to \infty } F_N(s)$ exists only for $0 \leq s \leq 1/2$.

Let $x\in [0,1)$ be an irrational number and let $x=[a_{1}(x),a_{2}(x),\ldots ]$ be its continued fraction expansion with partial quotients $\{a_{n}(x): n\geq 1\}$. Given a natural number m and a vector $(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{m})\in [0,1)^{m},$ we derive the asymptotic behaviour of the shortest distance function

$$ \begin{align*} M_{n,m}(x_{1},\ldots,x_{m})=\max\{k\in \mathbb{N}: a_{i+j}(x_{1})=\cdots= a_{i+j}(x_{m}) \ \text{for}~ j=1,\ldots,k \mbox{ and some } i \mbox{ with } 0\leq i \leq n-k\}, \end{align*} $$

which represents the run-length of the longest block of the same symbol among the first n partial quotients of $(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{m}).$ We also calculate the Hausdorff dimension of the level sets and exceptional sets arising from the shortest distance function.

We study fluctuations of the error term for the number of integer lattice points lying inside a three-dimensional Cygan–Korányi ball of large radius. We prove that the error term, suitably normalized, has a limiting value distribution which is absolutely continuous, and we provide estimates for the decay rate of the corresponding density on the real line. In addition, we establish the existence of all moments for the normalized error term, and we prove that these are given by the moments of the corresponding density.

In this paper, we reduce the logarithmic Sarnak conjecture to the $\{0,1\}$-symbolic systems with polynomial mean complexity. By showing that the logarithmic Sarnak conjecture holds for any topologically dynamical system with sublinear complexity, we provide a variant of the $1$-Fourier uniformity conjecture, where the frequencies are restricted to any subset of $[0,1]$ with packing dimension less than one.