Badly approximable points on planar curves and a problem of Davenport

Let \({\mathcal {C}}\) be two times continuously differentiable curve in \({\mathbb {R}}^2\) with at least one point at which the curvature is non-zero. For any \(i,j \geqslant 0\) with \(i+j =1\) , let \({\mathbf {Bad}}(i,j)\) denote the set of points \((x,y) \in {\mathbb {R}}^2\) for which \( \max \{ \Vert qx\Vert ^{1/i}, \, \Vert qy\Vert ^{1/j} \} > c/q \) for all \( q \in {\mathbb {N}}\) . Here \(c = c(x,y)\) is a positive constant. Our main result implies that any finite intersection of such sets with \({\mathcal {C}}\) has full Hausdorff dimension. This provides a solution to a problem of Davenport dating back to the sixties.