The rational base number system, introduced by Akiyama, Frougny, and Sakarovitch in 2008, is a generalization of the classical integer base number system. Within this framework two interesting families of infinite words emerge, called minimal and maximal words.
We formulate the conjecture that every minimal and maximal word is normal over an appropriate subalphabet.
The aim of the talk is to convince the audience that the conjecture seems true and of considerable difficulty. In particular, we shall discuss its connections with several older conjectures, including the existence of Z-numbers (Mahler, 1968) and Z_p/q-numbers (Flatto, 1992), the existence of triple expansions in rational base p/q (Akiyama, 2008), and the Collatz-inspired '4/3 problem' (Dubickas and Mossinghoff, 2009).
The talk is based on a joint work with Shalom Eliahou and Léo Vivion.
About twenty years ago, Peres and Weiss generalised the classical Poisson limit theorem for appearances of words of increasing length in a sequence x. They showed that the theorem holds for almost every x with respect to the infinite uniform product measure. A natural question is whether this Poisson behaviour persists when the sequence is sampled according to a different product measure.
In our first result, we consider non-stationary product measures and show that there exists a quantitative threshold above which the Poisson limit theorem holds for almost every x, while below this threshold it may fail. In contrast, our second result shows that for a biased infinite product measure (a non-fair coin) the limiting behaviour is almost surely non-Poisson. This shows that the Poisson regime is specific to the equiprobable case and to small deviations from it.
This talk is based on works with Mike Hochman and Jon V. Kogan.