We provide new quantitative versions of Helly’s theorem. For example, we show that for every family $\{P_{i}:i\in I\}$ of closed half-spaces in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ such that $P=\bigcap _{i\in I}P_{i}$ has positive volume, there exist $s\leqslant \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}n$ and $i_{1},\ldots ,i_{s}\in I$ such that

$$\begin{eqnarray}\operatorname{vol}_{n}(P_{i_{1}}\cap \cdots \cap P_{i_{s}})\leqslant (Cn)^{n}\operatorname{vol}_{n}(P),\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},C>0$

Define $r_{4}(N)$ to be the largest cardinality of a set $A\subset \{1,\ldots ,N\}$ that does not contain four elements in arithmetic progression. In 1998, Gowers proved that

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N(\log \log N)^{-c}\end{eqnarray}$$

$c>0$

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N\text{e}^{-c\sqrt{\log \log N}}.\end{eqnarray}$$

$$\begin{eqnarray}r_{4}(N)\ll N(\log N)^{-c},\end{eqnarray}$$

We apply multigrade efficient congruencing to estimate Vinogradov’s integral of degree $k$ for moments of order $2s$, establishing strongly diagonal behaviour for $1\leqslant s\leqslant \frac{1}{2}k(k+1)-\frac{1}{3}k+o(k)$. In particular, as $k\rightarrow \infty$, we confirm the main conjecture in Vinogradov’s mean value theorem for a proportion asymptotically approaching $100\%$ of the critical interval $1\leqslant s\leqslant \frac{1}{2}k(k+1)$.

For a finite field of odd cardinality $q$, we show that the sequence of iterates of $aX^{2}+c$, starting at $0$, always recurs after $O(q/\text{log}\log q)$ steps. For $X^{2}+1$, the same is true for any starting value. We suggest that the traditional “birthday paradox” model is inappropriate for iterates of $X^{3}+c$, when $q$ is 2 mod 3.

Let $h(d)$ be the class number of indefinite binary quadratic forms of discriminant $d$ and let $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d}$ be the corresponding fundamental unit. In this paper, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the $k$th moment of $h(d)$ over positive discriminants $d$ with $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d}\leqslant x$, uniformly for real numbers $k$ in the range $0<k\leqslant (\log x)^{1-o(1)}$. This improves upon the work of Raulf, who obtained such an asymptotic for a fixed positive integer $k$. We also investigate the distribution of large values of $h(d)$ when the discriminants $d$ are ordered according to the size of their fundamental units $\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d}$. In particular, we show that the tail of this distribution has the same shape as that of class numbers of imaginary quadratic fields ordered by the size of their discriminants. As an application of these results, we prove that there are many positive discriminants $d$ with class number $h(d)\geqslant (e^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}}/3+o(1))\cdot \unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d}(\log \log \unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d})/\log \,\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}_{d}$, a bound that we believe is best possible. We also obtain an upper bound for $h(d)$ that is twice as large, assuming the generalized Riemann hypothesis.

This paper is motivated by Davenport’s problem and the subsequent work regarding badly approximable points in submanifolds of a Euclidean space. We study the problem in the area of twisted Diophantine approximation and present two different approaches. The first approach shows that, under a certain restriction, any countable intersection of the sets of weighted badly approximable points on any non-degenerate ${\mathcal{C}}^{1}$ submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ has full dimension. In the second approach, we introduce the property of isotropically winning and show that the sets of weighted badly approximable points are isotropically winning under the same restriction as above.

Let $K$ be an algebraic number field of degree $d\geqslant 3$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{1},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{2},\ldots ,\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{d}$ the embeddings of $K$ into $\mathbb{C}$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ a non-zero element in $K$, $a_{0}\in \mathbb{Z}$, $a_{0}>0$ and

$$\begin{eqnarray}F_{0}(X,Y)=a_{0}\mathop{\prod }_{i=1}^{d}(X-\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{i}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})Y).\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}$

$K$

$a\in \mathbb{Z}$

$F_{0}(X,Y)\in \mathbb{Z}[X,Y]$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}^{a}$

$a\in \mathbb{Z}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}$

$$\begin{eqnarray}F_{a}(X,Y)=a_{0}\mathop{\prod }_{i=1}^{d}(X-\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{i}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}^{a})Y).\end{eqnarray}$$

$m>0$

$(x,y,a)\in \mathbb{Z}^{3}$

$$\begin{eqnarray}0<|F_{a}(x,y)|\leqslant m\end{eqnarray}$$

$xy\not =0$

$\mathbb{Q}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}^{a})=K$

$m$

$K$

$F_{0}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D710}$

$d$

We introduce a new arithmetic function $a(n)$ defined to be the number of random multiplications by residues modulo $n$ before the running product is congruent to zero modulo $n$. We give several formulas for computing the values of this function and analyze its asymptotic behavior. We find that it is closely related to $P_{1}(n)$, the largest prime divisor of $n$. In particular, $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ have the same average order asymptotically. Furthermore, the difference between the functions $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ is $o(1)$ as $n$ tends to infinity on a set with density approximately $0.623$. On the other hand, however, we see that (except on a set of density zero) the difference between $a(n)$ and $P_{1}(n)$ tends to infinity on the integers outside this set. Finally, we consider the asymptotic behavior of the difference between these two functions and find that $\sum _{n\leqslant x}(a(n)-P_{1}(n))\sim (1-\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}/4)\sum _{n\leqslant x}P_{2}(n)$, where $P_{2}(n)$ is the second largest divisor of $n$.

We consider an arithmetic function defined independently by John G. Thompson and Greg Simay, with particular attention to its mean value, its maximal size, and the analytic nature of its Dirichlet series generating function.

Recently, an analogue over $\mathbb{F}_{q}[T]$ of Landau’s theorem on sums of two squares was considered by Bary-Soroker, Smilansky and Wolf. They counted the number of monic polynomials in $\mathbb{F}_{q}[T]$ of degree $n$ of the form $A^{2}+TB^{2}$, which we denote by $B(n,q)$. They studied $B(n,q)$ in two limits: fixed $n$ and large $q$; and fixed $q$ and large $n$. We generalize their result to the most general limit $q^{n}\rightarrow \infty$. More precisely, we prove

$$\begin{eqnarray}B(n,q)\sim K_{q}\cdot \binom{n-\frac{1}{2}}{n}\cdot q^{n},\quad q^{n}\rightarrow \infty ,\end{eqnarray}$$

$K_{q}=1+O(1/q)$

Combinatorial discrepancy is a complexity measure of a collection of sets which quantifies how well the sets in the collection can be simultaneously balanced. More precisely, we are given an $n$-point set $P$, and a collection ${\mathcal{F}}=\{F_{1},\ldots ,F_{m}\}$ of subsets of $P$, and our goal is color $P$ with two colors, red and blue, so that the maximum over the $F_{i}$ of the absolute difference between the number of red elements and the number of blue elements (the discrepancy) is minimized. Combinatorial discrepancy has many applications in mathematics and computer science, including constructions of uniformly distributed point sets, and lower bounds for data structures and private data analysis algorithms. We investigate the combinatorial discrepancy of geometrically defined systems, in which $P$ is an $n$-point set in $d$-dimensional space, and ${\mathcal{F}}$ is the collection of subsets of $P$ induced by dilations and translations of a fixed convex polytope $B$. Such set systems include systems of sets induced by axis-aligned boxes, whose discrepancy is the subject of the well-known Tusnády problem. We prove new discrepancy upper and lower bounds for such set systems by extending the approach based on factorization norms previously used by the author, Matoušek, and Talwar. We also outline applications of our results to geometric discrepancy, data structure lower bounds, and differential privacy.

We transpose the parametric geometry of numbers, recently created by Schmidt and Summerer, to fields of rational functions in one variable and analyze, in that context, the problem of simultaneous approximation to exponential functions.

We prove that if $k$ and $\ell$ are sufficiently large, then all the zeros of the weight $k+\ell$ cusp form $E_{k}(z)E_{\ell }(z)-E_{k+\ell }(z)$ in the standard fundamental domain lie on the boundary. We, moreover, find formulas for the number of zeros on the bottom arc with $|z|=1$, and those on the sides with $Re(z)=\pm 1/2$. One important ingredient of the proof is an approximation of the Eisenstein series in terms of the Jacobi theta function.

Answering a question of Füredi and Loeb [On the best constant for the Besicovitch covering theorem. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.121(4) (1994), 1063–1073], we show that the maximum number of pairwise intersecting homothets of a $d$-dimensional centrally symmetric convex body $K$, none of which contains the center of another in its interior, is at most $O(3^{d}d\log d)$. If $K$ is not necessarily centrally symmetric and the role of its center is played by its centroid, then the above bound can be replaced by $O(3^{d}\binom{2d}{d}d\log d)$. We establish analogous results for the case where the center is defined as an arbitrary point in the interior of $K$. We also show that, in the latter case, one can always find families of at least $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}((2/\sqrt{3})^{d})$ translates of $K$ with the above property.

Introduced in Schmidt and Summerer [Parametric geometry of numbers and applications. Acta Arith.140 (2009), 67–91], approximation exponents $\text{}\underline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{i},\overline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{i}$, $(i=1,2,3)$, attached to points $\boldsymbol{\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}}=(\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}_{1},\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}_{2})$ in $\mathbb{R}^{2}$, give information on Diophantine approximation properties of these points. Laurent [Exponents of Diophantine approximation in dimension two. Canad. J. Math.61 (2009), 165–189] had described all possible quadruples $(\text{}\underline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{1},\overline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{1},\text{}\underline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{3},\overline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{3})$ arising in this way. Our emphasis here will be on $\text{}\underline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{2},\overline{\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}}_{2}$ and the construction of suitable “$3$-systems”.

We consider finite point subsets (distributions) in compact metric spaces. In the case of general rectifiable metric spaces, non-trivial bounds for sums of distances between points of distributions and for discrepancies of distributions in metric balls are given (Theorem 1.1). We generalize Stolarsky’s invariance principle to distance-invariant spaces (Theorem 2.1). For arbitrary metric spaces, we prove a probabilistic invariance principle (Theorem 3.1). Furthermore, we construct equal-measure partitions of general rectifiable compact metric spaces into parts of small average diameter (Theorem 4.1).