In mathematics, Roth's theorem is a fundamental result in diophantine approximation to algebraic numbers. It is of a qualitative type, stating that a given algebraic number
Contents
Statement
Roth's theorem states that every irrational algebraic number
can have only finitely many solutions in coprime integers
with
Discussion
The first result in this direction is Liouville's theorem on approximation of algebraic numbers, which gives an approximation exponent of d for an algebraic number α of degree d ≥ 2. This is already enough to demonstrate the existence of transcendental numbers. Thue realised that an exponent less than d would have applications to the solution of Diophantine equations and in Thue's theorem from 1909 established an exponent
Roth's result with exponent 2 is in some sense the best possible, because this statement would fail on setting ε = 0: by Dirichlet's theorem on diophantine approximation there are infinitely many solutions in this case. However, there is a stronger conjecture of Serge Lang that
can have only finitely many solutions in integers p and q. If one lets α run over the whole of the set of real numbers, not just the algebraic reals, then both Roth's conclusion and Lang's hold for almost all α. So both the theorem and the conjecture assert that a certain countable set misses a certain set of measure zero.
The theorem is not currently effective: that is, there is no bound known on the possible values of p,q given α. Davenport & Roth (1955) showed that Roth's techniques could be used to give an effective bound for the number of p/q satisfying the inequality, using a "gap" principle. The fact that we do not actually know C(ε) means that the project of solving the equation, or bounding the size of the solutions, is out of reach.
Proof technique
The proof technique was the construction of an auxiliary function in several variables, leading to a contradiction in the presence of too many good approximations. By its nature, it was ineffective (see effective results in number theory); this is of particular interest since a major application of this type of result is to bound the number of solutions of some diophantine equations.
Generalizations
There is a higher-dimensional version, Schmidt's subspace theorem, of the basic result. There are also numerous extensions, for example using the p-adic metric, based on the Roth method.
LeVeque generalized the result by showing that a similar bound holds when the approximating numbers are taken from a fixed algebraic number field. Define the height H(ξ) of an algebraic number ξ to be the maximum of the absolute values of the coefficients of its minimal polynomial. Fix κ>2. For a given algebraic number α and algebraic number field K, the equation
has only finitely many solutions in elements ξ of K.