On continuous postage stamping
by
Vsevolod F. Lev
University of Haifa

We show that if A is an open subset of (0, 1) of positive measure a < 0.1, then the semigroup additively generated by A contains all real numbers larger than (1-a)[1/a]. This bound is sharp, attained for A=(1-a, 1). The problem we consider is actually the continuous analogue of the well-known linear diophantine problem of Frobenius, also known as ``the postage stamp problem''.

Date received: April 13, 2004