An effective criterion for periodicity of l-adic continued fractions

Vendredi, 19. octobre 2018 - 14:00 - 15:00
Orateur: 

Francesco Veneziano (SNS Pisa)

Résumé: 

The theory of continued fractions has been generalized to l-adic numbers by several authors and presents many differences with respect to the real case. For example, in the l-adic case, rational numbers may have a periodic non-terminating expansion; moreover, for quadratic irrational numbers, no analogue of Lagrange's theorem holds, and the problem of deciding whether the continued fraction expansion is periodic was still open. In our paper (joint work with Laura Capuano and Umberto Zannier) we investigate the l-adic continued fraction expansions of rationals and quadratic irrationals using the definition introduced by Ruban. We give general explicit criteria to assess the periodicity of the expansion in both the rational and the quadratic case.