On digit patterns in expansions of rational numbers with prime denominator

Igor E. Shparlinski, Wolfgang Steiner

Published 2012-05-25Version 1

We show that, for any fixed $\varepsilon > 0$ and almost all primes $p$, the $g$-ary expansion of any fraction $m/p$ with $\gcd(m,p) = 1$ contains almost all $g$-ary strings of length $k < (5/24 - \varepsilon) \log_g p$. This complements a result of J. Bourgain, S. V. Konyagin, and I. E. Shparlinski that asserts that, for almost all primes, all $g$-ary strings of length $k < (41/504 -\varepsilon) \log_g p$ occur in the $g$-ary expansion of $m/p$.