Gap theorems for linear forms and for rotations on higher dimensional tori (Alan Haynes, University of Houston)

This talk is based on joint work with Jens Marklof, and with Roland Roeder. The three distance theorem states that, if x is any real number and N is any positive integer, the points x, 2x, … , Nx modulo 1 partition the unit interval into component intervals having at most 3 distinct lengths. We will present two higher dimensional analogues of this problem. In the first we consider points of the form mx+ny modulo 1, where x and y are real numbers and m and n are integers taken from an expanding set in the plane. This version of the problem was previously studied by Geelen and Simpson, Chevallier, Erdős, and many other people, and it is closely related to the Littlewood conjecture in Diophantine approximation. The second version of the problem is a straightforward generalization to rotations on higher dimensional tori which, surprisingly, has been mostly overlooked in the literature. For the two dimensional torus, we are able to prove a five distance theorem, which is best possible. In higher dimensions we also have bounds, but establishing optimal bounds is an open problem.