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Distribution of Class Numbers in Continued Fraction Families of Real Quadratic Fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2018

Alexander Dahl
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J1P3, Canada (aodahl@yorku.ca)
Vítězslav Kala
Affiliation:
University of Göttingen, Mathematisches Institut, Bunsenstr. 3-5, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Department of Algebra, Sokolov-ská 83, 18600 Praha 8, Czech Republic (vita.kala@gmail.com)
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Abstract

We construct a random model to study the distribution of class numbers in special families of real quadratic fields ${\open Q}(\sqrt d )$ arising from continued fractions. These families are obtained by considering continued fraction expansions of the form $\sqrt {D(n)} = [f(n),\overline {u_1,u_2, \ldots ,u_{s-1} ,2f(n)]} $ with fixed coefficients u1, …, us−1 and generalize well-known families such as Chowla's 4n2 + 1, for which analogous results were recently proved by Dahl and Lamzouri [‘The distribution of class numbers in a special family of real quadratic fields’, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. (2018), 6331–6356].

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 2018 

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