English

On periodicity of geodesic continued fractions

Number Theory 2017-12-25 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we present some generalizations of Lagrange's theorem in the classical theory of continued fractions motivated by the geometric interpretation of the classical theory in terms of closed geodesics on the modular curve. As a result, for an extension F/FF/F' of number fields with rank one relative unit group, we construct a geodesic multi-dimensional continued fraction algorithm to "expand" any basis of FF over Q\mathbb{Q}, and prove its periodicity. Furthermore, we show that the periods describe the relative unit group. By developing the above argument adelically, we also obtain a pp-adelic continued fraction algorithm and its periodicity for imaginary quadratic irrationals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.08346,
  title  = {On periodicity of geodesic continued fractions},
  author = {Hohto Bekki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.08346},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

35 pages. This is the first draft of the article published in the Journal of Number Theory. I will soon update the article with the accepted manuscript