Let \[||x||\] denote the distance from \[x \in \mathbb{R}\] to the nearest integer. In this paper, we prove a new existence and density result for matrices \[A \in {\mathbb{R}^{m \times n}}\] satisfying the inequality

\[\mathop {\lim \inf }\limits_{|q{|_\infty } \to + \infty } \prod\limits_{j = 1}^n {\max } \{ 1,|{q_j}|\} \log {\left( {\prod\limits_{j = 1}^n {\max } \{ 1,|{q_j}|\} } \right)^{m + n - 1}}\prod\limits_{i = 1}^m {{A_i}q} > 0,\]

where q ranges in \[{\mathbb{Z}^n}\] and Ai denote the rows of the matrix A. This result extends previous work of Moshchevitin both to arbitrary dimension and to the inhomogeneous setting. The estimates needed to apply Moshchevitin’s method to the case m > 2 are not currently available. We therefore develop a substantially different method, based on Cantor-like set constructions of Badziahin and Velani. Matrices with the above property also appear to have very small sums of reciprocals of fractional parts. This fact helps us to shed light on a question raised by Lê and Vaaler on such sums, thereby proving some new estimates in higher dimension.

Let ${\mathbf {G}}$ be a semisimple algebraic group over a number field K, $\mathcal {S}$ a finite set of places of K, $K_{\mathcal {S}}$ the direct product of the completions $K_{v}, v \in \mathcal {S}$ , and ${\mathcal O}$ the ring of $\mathcal {S}$ -integers of K. Let $G = {\mathbf {G}}(K_{\mathcal {S}})$ , $\Gamma = {\mathbf {G}}({\mathcal O})$ and $\pi :G \rightarrow G/\Gamma $ the quotient map. We describe the closures of the locally divergent orbits ${T\pi (g)}$ where T is a maximal $K_{\mathcal {S}}$ -split torus in G. If $\# S = 2$ then the closure $ \overline{T\pi (g)}$ is a finite union of T-orbits stratified in terms of parabolic subgroups of ${\mathbf {G}} \times {\mathbf {G}}$ and, consequently, $\overline{T\pi (g)}$ is homogeneous (i.e. $\overline{T\pi (g)}= H\pi (g)$ for a subgroup H of G) if and only if ${T\pi (g)}$ is closed. On the other hand, if $\# \mathcal {S}> 2$ and K is not a $\mathrm {CM}$ -field then $\overline {T\pi (g)}$ is homogeneous for ${\mathbf {G}} = \mathbf {SL}_{n}$ and, generally, non-homogeneous but squeezed between closed orbits of two reductive subgroups of equal semisimple K-ranks for ${\mathbf {G}} \neq \mathbf {SL}_{n}$ . As an application, we prove that $\overline {f({\mathcal O}^{n})} = K_{\mathcal {S}}$ for the class of non-rational locally K-decomposable homogeneous forms $f \in K_{\mathcal {S}}[x_1, \ldots , x_{n}]$ .

We prove a new upper bound for the smallest zero $x$ of a quadratic form over a number field with the additional restriction that $x$ does not lie in a finite number of $m$ prescribed hyperplanes. Our bound is polynomial in the height of the quadratic form, with an exponent depending only on the number of variables but not on $m$.