Balanced Stick Breaking

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Clément, François, Steinerberger, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Clément, François
Steinerberger, Stefan
author_facet Clément, François
Steinerberger, Stefan
contents Consider an infinite sequence $(x_k)_{k=1}^{\infty}$ on the unit circle $\mathbb{S}^1$. We may interpret the first $n$ elements $(x_k)_{k=1}^{n}$ as places where the `circular stick' $\mathbb{S}^1$ is broken into a total of $n+1$ pieces. It is clear that they cannot all be the same length all the time. de Bruijn and Erdős (1949) show that the ratio of the largest to the smallest has to be arbitrarily close to 2 infinitely many times which is sharp. They also consider the problem of balancing the length of $r$ consecutive intervals and prove $$ \frac{\max \mbox{length of}~r~\mbox{consecutive intervals}}{\min \mbox{length of}~r~\mbox{consecutive intervals}} \geq 1 + \frac{1}{r}.$$ We prove that this ratio can be as small as $1 + c \log{r}/ r$. This is done by means of refined discrepancy estimates for the van der Corput sequence over very short intervals and proves a conjecture of Brethouwer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Balanced Stick Breaking
Clément, François
Steinerberger, Stefan
Combinatorics
Consider an infinite sequence $(x_k)_{k=1}^{\infty}$ on the unit circle $\mathbb{S}^1$. We may interpret the first $n$ elements $(x_k)_{k=1}^{n}$ as places where the `circular stick' $\mathbb{S}^1$ is broken into a total of $n+1$ pieces. It is clear that they cannot all be the same length all the time. de Bruijn and Erdős (1949) show that the ratio of the largest to the smallest has to be arbitrarily close to 2 infinitely many times which is sharp. They also consider the problem of balancing the length of $r$ consecutive intervals and prove $$ \frac{\max \mbox{length of}~r~\mbox{consecutive intervals}}{\min \mbox{length of}~r~\mbox{consecutive intervals}} \geq 1 + \frac{1}{r}.$$ We prove that this ratio can be as small as $1 + c \log{r}/ r$. This is done by means of refined discrepancy estimates for the van der Corput sequence over very short intervals and proves a conjecture of Brethouwer.
title Balanced Stick Breaking
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14637