Wednesday, May 31, 2017

exponentiation - For each irrational number b, does there exist an irrational number a such that ab is rational?



It is well known that there exist two irrational numbers a and b such that ab is rational.




By the way, I've been interested in the following two propositions.



Proposition 1 : For each irrational number a>0, there exists an irrational number b such that ab is rational.



Proposition 2 : For each irrational number b, there exists an irrational number a such that ab is rational.



I got the following :





Proposition 1 is true.



Suppose that both ln2lna and ln3lna are rational. There exists a set of four non-zero integers (m1,m2,n1,n2) such that ln2lna=n1m1 and ln3lna=n2m2. Since one has a=2m1/n1=3m2/n2, one has 2m1n2=3m2n1. This is a contradiction. It follows that either ln2lna or ln3lna is irrational. Hence, either setting b=ln2lna or setting b=ln3lna works.




Then, I began to consider if proposition 2 is true.



To prove that proposition 2 is true, it is sufficient to show that for each irrational number b, there exists a rational number c such that c1/b is irrational.



This seems true, but I have not been able to prove that. So, my question is the following :





Question : Is proposition 2 true? If yes, how can we show that? If no, what is a counterexample?



Proposition 2 : For each irrational number b, there exists an irrational number a such that ab is rational.



Answer



What you want to prove is: given an irrational number b, then one of the following numbers :
r1b      rQ
is irrational, this seems to be an attainable result for what we know nowadays about the transcendence of numbers, we have for example the following theorem:





Six Exponentials Theorem:Let (x1,x2) and (y1,y2,y3) be two sets of complex numbers linearly independent over the rationals. Then at least one of
ex1y1,ex1y2,ex1y3,ex2y1,ex2y2,ex2y3
is transcendental.




Given an irrational number x, let x1=1,x2=x and y1=ln(p1),y2=ln(p2),y3=ln(p3) for some primes p1,p2,p3 hence using this theorem we have : at least one of:
p1,p2,p3,px1,px2,px3
is irrational which gives us the following well known consequence:





Six Exponentials Theorem (special case). If x is a real number such that px1 , px2 and px3 are rational numbers for three distinct primes p1,p2 and p3, then xZ




If we use this theorem one k1b of the numbers 21b,31b,51b is irrational. and hence you can take a=k1b and we have ab is an integer among {2,3,5} which implies of course that it's rational.



Comment Maybe there is a very simpler answer which does not use this strong theorem.


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