Interior Hulls of Clean Lattice Parallelograms and Continued Fractions

The interior hull of a lattice polygon is the convex closure of the lattice points in the interior of the polygon. In this paper we give a concrete description of the interior hull of a clean lattice parallelogram. A clean parallelogram in $\mathbb{R}^2$ is a lattice parallelogram whose boundary contains no lattice points other than its vertices. Using unimodular maps we can identify a clean parallelogram with a parallelogram, $P_{a,n}$, whose vertices are $(0,0), (1,0), (a,n)$ and $(a+1,n)$, with $0<a <n$ and $\gcd(a,n)=1$. Following Stark's geometric approach to continued fractions we show that the convergents of the continued fraction of $n/a$ (viewed as lattice points) appear in a one-to-two correspondence with the vertices of the interior hull of this parallelogram. Consequently, if the continued fraction of $n/a$ has many partial quotients, then the interior hull of the corresponding parallelogram has many vertices. A pleasing consequence of our work is that we obtain an elementary geometric interpretation of the sum of the partial quotients of the continued fraction of $n/a$. Specifically, it is the difference between the area of the clean parallelogram $P_{a,n}$ and the area of its interior hull.