Uniform distribution of powers mod 1

A few days ago I wrote about how powers of the golden ratio are nearly integers but powers of π are not. This post is similar but takes a little different perspective. Instead of looking at how close powers are to the nearest integers, we’ll look at how close they are to their floor, the largest integer below. Put another way, we’ll throw away the integer parts and look at the decimal parts.

First a theorem:

For almost all x > 1, the sequence (xⁿ) for n = 1, 2, 3, … is u.d. mod 1. [1]

Here “almost all” is a technical term meaning that the set of x‘s for which the statement above does not hold has Lebesgue measure zero. The abbreviation “u.d.” stands for “uniformly distributed.” A sequence uniformly distributed mod 1 if the fractional parts of the sequence are distributed like uniform random variables.

Even though the statement holds for almost all x, it’s hard to prove for particular values of x. And it’s easy to find particular values of x for which the theorem does not hold.

From [1]:

… it is interesting to note that one does not know whether sequences such as (eⁿ), (πⁿ), or even ((3/2)ⁿ) are u.d. mod 1 or not.

Obviously powers of integers are not u.d. mod 1 because their fractional parts are all 0. And we’ve shown before that powers of the golden ratio and powers of the plastic constant are near integers, i.e. their fractional parts cluster near 0 and 1.

The curious part about the quote above is that it’s not clear whether powers of 3/2 are uniformly distributed mod 1. I wouldn’t expect powers of any rational number to be u.d. mod 1. Either my intuition was wrong, or it’s right but hasn’t been proved, at least not when [1] was written.

The next post will look at powers of 3/2 mod 1 and whether they appear to be uniformly distributed.

* * *

[1] Kuipers and Niederreiter, Uniform Distribution of Sequences