An elementary treatment of a general diophantine problem
We prove an explicit formula of Atkinson type for the error term in the asymptotic formula for the mean square of the product of the Riemann zeta-function and a Dirichlet polynomial. To deal with the case when coefficients of the Dirichlet polynomial are complex, we apply the idea of the first author in his study on mean values of Dirichlet L-functions.
A general hypergeometric construction of linear forms in (odd) zeta values is presented. The construction allows to recover the records of Rhin and Viola for the irrationality measures of and , as well as to explain Rivoal’s recent result on infiniteness of irrational numbers in the set of odd zeta values, and to prove that at least one of the four numbers , , , and is irrational.