In the present paper, we study the geometric discrepancy with respect to families of rotated rectangles. The well-known extremal cases are the axis-parallel rectangles (logarithmic discrepancy) and rectangles rotated in all possible directions (polyn
omial discrepancy). We study several intermediate situations: lacunary sequences of directions, lacunary sets of finite order, and sets with small Minkowski dimension. In each of these cases, extensions of a lemma due to Davenport allow us to construct appropriate rotations of the integer lattice which yield small discrepancy.
It is shown that product BMO of Chang and Fefferman, defined on the product of Euclidean spaces can be characterized by the multiparameter commutators of Riesz transforms. This extends a classical one-parameter result of Coifman, Rochberg, and Weiss,
and at the same time extends the work of Lacey and Ferguson and Lacey and Terwilleger on multiparameter commutators with Hilbert transforms. The method of proof requires the real-variable methods throughout, which is new in the multi-parameter context.
