Approximating reals by sums of two rationals

Tsz Ho Chan

Published 2006-09-12, updated 2007-04-20Version 2

We generalize Dirichlet's diophantine approximation theorem to approximating any real number $\alpha$ by a sum of two rational numbers $\frac{a_1}{q_1} + \frac{a_2}{q_2}$ with denominators $1 \leq q_1, q_2 \leq N$. This turns out to be related to the congruence equation problem $x y \equiv c \pmod q$ with $1 \leq x, y \leq q^{1/2 + \epsilon}$.