Typicality of normal numbers with respect to the Cantor series expansion

Bill Mance

Published 2010-10-12, updated 2011-08-30Version 2

Fix a sequence of integers $Q=\{q_n\}_{n=1}^\infty$ such that $q_n$ is greater than or equal to 2 for all $n$. In this paper, we improve upon results by J. Galambos and F. Schweiger showing that almost every (in the sense of Lebesgue measure) real number in $[0,1)$ is $Q$-normal with respect to the $Q$-Cantor series expansion for sequences $Q$ that satisfy a certain condition. We also provide asymptotics describing the number of occurrences of blocks of digits in the $Q$-Cantor series expansion of a typical number. The notion of strong $Q$-normality, that satisfies a similar typicality result, is introduced. Both of these notions are equivalent for the $b$-ary expansion, but strong normality is stronger than normality for the Cantor series expansion. In order to show this, we provide an explicit construction of a sequence $Q$ and a real number that is $Q$-normal, but not strongly $Q$-normal. We use the results in this paper to show that under a mild condition on the sequence $Q$, a set satisfying a weaker notion of normality, studied by A. R\'enyi in \cite{Renyi}, will be dense in $[0,1)$.