Continued Fractions of Arithmetic Sequences of Quadratics

Abstract

Let x be a quadratic irrational and let P be the set of prime numbers. We show the existence of an infinite subset S of P such that the statistics of the period of the continued fraction expansions along the sequence {px: p\in S} approach the normal statistics given by the Gauss-Kuzmin measure. Under the generalized Riemann hypothesis, we prove that there exist full density subsets S of P and T of N satisfying the same assertion. We give a rate of convergence in all cases.

To appear in Expositiones Mathematicae