Badly approximable numbers for sequences of balls

Simon Baker

Published 2014-05-22, updated 2014-05-29Version 2

It is a classical result from Diophantine approximation that the set of badly approximable numbers has Lebesgue measure zero. In this paper we generalise this result to more general sequences of balls. Given a countable set of closed $d$-dimensional Euclidean balls $\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty},$ we say that $\alpha\in \mathbb{R}^{d}$ is a badly approximable number with respect to $\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty}$ if there exists $\kappa(\alpha)>0$ and $N(\alpha)\in\mathbb{N}$ such that $\alpha\notin B(x_{i},\kappa(\alpha)r_{i})$ for all $i\geq N(\alpha)$. Under natural conditions on the set of balls, we prove that the set of badly approximable numbers with respect to $\{B(x_{i},r_{i})\}_{i=1}^{\infty}$ has Lebesgue measure zero. Moreover, our approach yields a new proof that the set of badly approximable numbers has Lebesgue measure zero.