English

Coding of geodesics on some modular surfaces and applications to odd and even continued fractions

Dynamical Systems 2019-07-03 v5 Number Theory

Abstract

The connection between geodesics on the modular surface PSL(2,Z)\H\operatorname{PSL}(2,{\mathbb Z})\backslash {\mathbb H} and regular continued fractions, established by Series, is extended to a connection between geodesics on Γ\H\Gamma\backslash {\mathbb H} and odd and grotesque continued fractions, where ΓZ3Z3\Gamma\cong {\Bbb Z}_3 \ast {\Bbb Z}_3 is the index two subgroup of PSL(2,Z)\operatorname{PSL}(2,{\mathbb Z}) generated by the order three elements (0111)\left( \begin{smallmatrix} 0 & -1 \\ 1 & 1 \end{smallmatrix} \right) and (0111)\left( \begin{smallmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ -1 & 1 \end{smallmatrix} \right), having an ideal quadrilateral as fundamental domain. A similar connection between geodesics on Θ\H\Theta\backslash {\mathbb H} and even continued fractions is discussed in our framework, where Θ\Theta denotes the Theta subgroup of PSL(2,Z)\operatorname{PSL}(2,{\mathbb Z}) generated by (0110)\left( \begin{smallmatrix} 0 & -1 \\ 1 & 0 \end{smallmatrix} \right) and (1201)\left( \begin{smallmatrix} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1 \end{smallmatrix} \right).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.06965,
  title  = {Coding of geodesics on some modular surfaces and applications to odd and even continued fractions},
  author = {Florin P. Boca and Claire Merriman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.06965},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages, minor typos corrected and clarifications added in the published version