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 r∈Q
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 x∈Z
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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