Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
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Claim. There is a strictly increasing real sequence with and such that the multiples are not uniformly distributed relative to for almost every . Schmidt's setting (p. 137): for , is the union of the lower -parts of the gaps, ; the multiples are uniformly distributed relative to when the proportion of with tends to for every ; and is on and elsewhere. The theorem is printed as "Theorem 1. There is a function of the type considered above such that (6) for almost every " (p. 137). In the problem page's notation, with for (Schmidt's lies below ), the position of within its gap is below exactly when , so Schmidt's test function is and its averages are ; uniform distribution of the positions would force these to tend to , and (6) says their absolute value returns to for almost every (an authored translation, recorded on the problem page). The finitely many with , where the problem's is undefined and Schmidt's first interval starts at , do not affect the limit. So the sequence tends to infinity with , and for almost every the sequence is not uniformly distributed: the corrected Statement of [[problems/number_theory/E0492/_index|Problem 492]] is false. The theorem is compiled on the result page theorem_1; the digest is on the card schmidt_1969_disproof_conjectures_diophantine_approximations.
Argument, in outline. Lemma 1 (pp. 138--140) builds, for given and , a subdivision of the unit interval with mesh below whose test function satisfies for every integer with whenever and lie in the unit interval, outside a set of measure below , by Dirichlet's simultaneous approximation of the numbers ; Section 3 (pp. 140--141) glues scaled copies on blocks with , so that the -th block has gaps and, for in a fixed interval outside exceptional sets of measure at most , which tends to zero, so that almost every avoids infinitely many of them, the values agree for , which gives (6). The proof is not independently checked here.
Formalization. Collin Yuanjie Ren's AI-assisted Lean development,
linked above at a pinned commit, formalizes Schmidt's counterexample in the
form that the multiples are not uniformly distributed relative to the
constructed sequence for almost every , not the exact limsup (6);
its root is Erdos492Real.schmidt_counterexample. It is third-party Lean,
not built here, so no formalized evidence is listed.
Acceptance. Refereed: W. M. Schmidt, Disproof of some conjectures on Diophantine approximations, Studia Sci. Math. Hungar. 4 (1969), 137--144, received 2 April 1968 (the paper's running header misprints the volume as "3 (1968)"); the record carries no finer publication date than the year, so the page is named by its first day. Reviewed: the site's curator, Thomas F. Bloom, labels the problem DISPROVED and credits Schmidt, in the problem's commentary, with showing that the general conjecture is false; the curator neither wrote nor submitted the result. Nothing here is independently reviewed by this project.
Depends on. Nothing on the wiki; the construction is self-contained in the refereed paper linked above.