English

Sharpening Vahlen's result in Diophantine approximation

Dynamical Systems 2025-04-30 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

n this paper we refine Vahlen's 1895 result in Diophantine approximation by providing sharper bounds for the approximation coefficients, especially when at least one of the partial quotients ana_n or an+1a_{n+1} of the regular continued fraction expansion [a0;a1,a2,][a_0;a_1,a_2,\dots] of xx is 1. An improvement of Vahlen's result was already given in papers by Jaroslav Han\u{c}l ([9]), Han\u{c}l and Silvie Bahnerova ([10]), and by Dinesh Sharma Bhattarai ([5]), but the approach of the present paper is very different from Han\u{c}l c.s. We believe that the geometrical methods used in this paper not only offer a significant improvement over Vahlen's result, but also yield new insights that can contribute to improving Borel's classical constant.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.20640,
  title  = {Sharpening Vahlen's result in Diophantine approximation},
  author = {Ayreena Bakhtawar and Cor Kraaikamp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20640},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:15:09.622Z