On the exact rate of convergence of frequencies of digits in self-similar sets

We study the exact rate of convergence of frequencies of digits of “normal” points of a self-similar set. Our results have applications to metric number theory. One particular application gives the following surprising result: there is an uncountable family of pairwise disjoint and exceptionally big subsets of ℝd that do not obey the law of the iterated logarithm. More precisely, we prove that there is an uncountable family of pairwise disjoint and exceptionally big sets of points x in ℝd—namely, sets with full Hausdorff dimension—for which the rate of convergence of frequencies of digits in the N-adic expansion of x is either significantly faster or significantly slower than the typical rate of convergence predicted by the law of the iterated logarithm.