Continued Fraction - Continued Fractions and Chaos

Continued Fractions and Chaos

Continued fractions also play a role in the study of chaos, where they tie together the Farey fractions which are seen in the Mandelbrot set with Minkowski's question mark function and the modular group Gamma.

The backwards shift operator for continued fractions is the map called the Gauss map, which lops off digits of a continued fraction expansion: . The transfer operator of this map is called the Gauss–Kuzmin–Wirsing operator. The distribution of the digits in continued fractions is given by the zero'th eigenvector of this operator, and is called the Gauss–Kuzmin distribution.