Skip to main content
3 of 3
replaced http://math.stackexchange.com/ with https://math.stackexchange.com/

What numbers can be approximated "pretty well" by rationals?

More precisely, what real numbers $r$ have the following property: for any $\epsilon > 0$ there exist infinitely many pairs $(p, q)$ of integers such that

$$\left| \frac{p}{q} - r \right| < \frac{\epsilon}{q^2}.$$

I think that this is impossible if $r$ is a quadratic irrational. On the other hand, it's certainly possible for any number with irrationality measure strictly greater than $2$.

What I really want to know is if the real numbers which don't have the property above have measure zero. If that's true, it would answer the last part of this math.SE question.

Qiaochu Yuan
  • 118.2k
  • 40
  • 447
  • 741