In this paper we study the Duffin–Schaeffer conjecture, which claims that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}(\bigcap _{m=1}^{\infty }\bigcup _{n=m}^{\infty }{\mathcal{E}}_{n})=1$ if and only if $\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}({\mathcal{E}}_{n})=\infty$ , where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}$ denotes the Lebesgue measure on $\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$ ,

$$\begin{eqnarray}{\mathcal{E}}_{n}={\mathcal{E}}_{n}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D713})=\mathop{\bigcup }_{\substack{ m=1 \\ (m,n)=1}}^{n}\bigg(\frac{m-\unicode[STIX]{x1D713}(n)}{n},\frac{m+\unicode[STIX]{x1D713}(n)}{n}\bigg),\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D713}$

$\bigcap _{m=1}^{\infty }\bigcup _{n=m}^{\infty }{\mathcal{E}}_{n}$

$\bigcup _{n=1}^{\infty }{\mathcal{E}}_{n}$

$C>0$

$$\begin{eqnarray}\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}\bigg(\mathop{\bigcup }_{n=1}^{\infty }{\mathcal{E}}_{n}\bigg)\geqslant C\min \bigg\{\mathop{\sum }_{n=1}^{\infty }\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}({\mathcal{E}}_{n}),1\bigg\}.\end{eqnarray}$$

$p$

We show that a system of r quadratic forms over a 𝔭-adic field in at least 4r+1 variables will have a non-trivial zero as soon as the cardinality of the residue field is large enough. In contrast, the Ax–Kochen theorem [J. Ax and S. Kochen, Diophantine problems over local fields. I, Amer. J. Math. 87 (1965), 605–630] requires the characteristic to be large in terms of the degree of the field over ℚp. The proofs use a 𝔭-adic minimization technique, together with counting arguments over the residue class field, based on considerations from algebraic geometry.

The Skolem–Mahler–Lech theorem states that if $f(n)$ is a sequence given by a linear recurrence over a field of characteristic 0, then the set of m such that $f(m)$ is equal to 0 is the union of a finite number of arithmetic progressions in $m\ge 0$ and a finite set. We prove that if X is a subvariety of an affine variety Y over a field of characteristic 0 and q is a point in Y, and $\sigma$ is an automorphism of Y, then the set of m such that $\sigma^m({\bf q})$ lies in X is a union of a finite number of complete doubly-infinite arithmetic progressions and a finite set. We show that this is a generalisation of the Skolem–Mahler–Lech theorem.