In this paper we give a simple proof of an inequality for intermediate Diophantine exponents obtained recently by W. M. Schmidt and L. Summerer.
Introduction∞ the unit ball in sup-norm, i.e. the cube with vertices at the points (±1, . . . , ±1).W. M. Schmidt and L. Summerer [3,4] studied the asymptotic behaviour of the successive minima of the body G t B d ∞ with respect to the given lattice Λ. An appropriate choice of Λ connects this setting with the classical setting of simultaneous Diophantine approximation.In [4] Schmidt and Summerer proved important inequalities connecting the asymptotics of the first and the p-th successive minima, which lead them to an improvement of a famous Jarník's inequality between the uniform and the ordinary Diophantine exponents [2]. However, the proof they proposed was rather difficult. It uses Mahler's theory of compound bodies and involves a complicated, cumbersome analysis of special piecewise linear functions.In the present paper we give a short proof of the main result of [4]. It relies on a simple geometric observation (see Lemma 1 below) and does not use the theory of compounds.