English

Noncanonical number systems in the integers

Number Theory 2008-10-03 v1

Abstract

The well known binary and decimal representations of the integers, and other similar number systems, admit many generalisations. Here, we investigate whether still every integer could have a finite expansion on a given integer base b, when we choose a digit set that does not contain 0. We prove that such digit sets exist and we provide infinitely many examples for every base b with |b|\ge 4, and for b=-2. For the special case b=-2, we give a full characterisation of all valid digit sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.2190,
  title  = {Noncanonical number systems in the integers},
  author = {Christiaan van de Woestijne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.2190},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

30 pages, to appear in Journal of Number Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:30:35.365Z