Rational points on the unit sphere

It is known that the unit sphere, centered at the origin in ℝ ⁿ , has a dense set of points with rational coordinates. We give an elementary proof of this fact that includes explicit bounds on the complexity of the coordinates: for every point ν on the unit sphere in ℝ ⁿ , and every ν > 0; there is a point r = (r ₁; r ₂;…;r _n) such that:

–	⊎ ‖r-v‖∞ < ε.
–	⊎ r is also a point on the unit sphere; Σ r i 2 = 1.
–	⊎ r has rational coordinates; for some integers a i , b i .
–	⊎ for all .

One consequence of this result is a relatively simple and quantitative proof of the fact that the rational orthogonal group O(n;ℚ) is dense in O(n;ℝ) with the topology induced by Frobenius’ matrix norm. Unitary matrices in U(n;ℂ) can likewise be approximated by matrices in U(n;ℚ(i))