We consider linear-fractional branching processes (one-type and two-type) with immigration in varying environments. For $n\ge0$, let $Z_n$ count the number of individuals of the nth generation, which excludes the immigrant who enters the system at time n. We call n a regeneration time if $Z_n=0$. For both the one-type and two-type cases, we give criteria for the finiteness or infiniteness of the number of regeneration times. We then construct some concrete examples to exhibit the strange phenomena caused by the so-called varying environments. For example, it may happen that the process is extinct, but there are only finitely many regeneration times. We also study the asymptotics of the number of regeneration times of the model in the example.

We study the exact Hausdorff and packing dimensions of the prime Cantor set, $\Lambda _P$, which comprises the irrationals whose continued fraction entries are prime numbers. We prove that the Hausdorff measure of the prime Cantor set cannot be finite and positive with respect to any sufficiently regular dimension function, thus negatively answering a question of Mauldin and Urbański (1999) and Mauldin (2013) for this class of dimension functions. By contrast, under a reasonable number-theoretic conjecture we prove that the packing measure of the conformal measure on the prime Cantor set is in fact positive and finite with respect to the dimension function $\psi (r) = r^\delta \log ^{-2\delta }\log (1/r)$, where $\delta $ is the dimension (conformal, Hausdorff, and packing) of the prime Cantor set.

We study the multifractal properties of the uniform approximation exponent and asymptotic approximation exponent in continued fractions. As a corollary, we calculate the Hausdorff dimension of the uniform Diophantine set

$$ \begin{align*} {\mathcal{U}(\hat{\nu})}= &\ \{x\in[0,1)\colon \text{for all }N\gg1,\text{ there exists }n\in[1,N],\\&\ \ \text{ such that }|T^{n}(x)-y| < |I_{N}(y)|^{\hat{\nu}}\} \end{align*} $$

$y\in [0,1)$

Let $[a_1(x),a_2(x),a_3(x),\ldots ]$ be the continued fraction expansion of an irrational number $x\in [0,1)$. We are concerned with the asymptotic behaviour of the product of consecutive partial quotients of x. We prove that, for Lebesgue almost all $x\in [0,1)$,

$$ \begin{align*} \liminf_{n \to \infty} \frac{\log (a_n(x)a_{n+1}(x))}{\log n} = 0\quad \text{and}\quad \limsup_{n \to \infty} \frac{\log (a_n(x)a_{n+1}(x))}{\log n}=1. \end{align*} $$

We also study the Baire category and the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points for which the above liminf and limsup have other different values and similarly analyse the weighted product of consecutive partial quotients.

Dirichlet’s theorem, including the uniform setting and asymptotic setting, is one of the most fundamental results in Diophantine approximation. The improvement of the asymptotic setting leads to the well-approximable set (in words of continued fractions)

$$ \begin{align*} \mathcal{K}(\Phi):=\{x:a_{n+1}(x)\ge\Phi(q_{n}(x))\ \textrm{for infinitely many }n\in \mathbb{N}\}; \end{align*} $$

$$ \begin{align*} \mathcal{G}(\Phi):=\{x:a_{n}(x)a_{n+1}(x)\ge\Phi(q_{n}(x))\ \textrm{for infinitely many }n\in \mathbb{N}\}. \end{align*} $$

$\Phi _{1},\Phi _{2}:[1,+\infty )\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^{+}$

$\mathcal {G}(\Phi _{1})\!\setminus\! \mathcal {K}(\Phi _{2})$

$\mathcal {G}(\Phi )$

$\mathcal {K}(\Phi )$

$\Phi $

$\mathcal {G}(\Phi _{1})\!\setminus\! \mathcal {K}(\Phi _{2})$

$\Phi _1$

We prove the convergence and ergodicity of a wide class of real and higher-dimensional continued fraction algorithms, including folded and $\alpha $ -type variants of complex, quaternionic, octonionic, and Heisenberg continued fractions, which we combine under the framework of Iwasawa continued fractions. The proof is based on the interplay of continued fractions and hyperbolic geometry, the ergodicity of geodesic flow in associated modular manifolds, and a variation on the notion of geodesic coding that we refer to as geodesic marking. As a corollary of our study of markable geodesics, we obtain a generalization of Serret’s tail-equivalence theorem for almost all points. The results are new even in the case of some real and complex continued fractions.

We define a family $\mathcal {B}(t)$ of compact subsets of the unit interval which provides a filtration of the set of numbers whose continued fraction expansion has bounded digits. We study how the set $\mathcal {B}(t)$ changes as the parameter t ranges in $[0,1]$ , and see that the family undergoes period-doubling bifurcations and displays the same transition pattern from periodic to chaotic behaviour as the family of real quadratic polynomials. The set $\mathcal {E}$ of bifurcation parameters is a fractal set of measure zero and Hausdorff dimension $1$ . The Hausdorff dimension of $\mathcal {B}(t)$ varies continuously with the parameter, and we show that the dimension of each individual set equals the dimension of the corresponding section of the bifurcation set $\mathcal {E}$ .

We consider the continued fraction expansion of real numbers under the action of a nonuniform lattice in $\text {PSL}(2,{\mathbb R})$ and prove metric relations between the convergents and a natural geometric notion of good approximations.

In this article we aim to investigate the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points $x \in [0,1)$ such that for any $r\in \mathbb {N}$ ,

$$ \begin{align*} a_{n+1}(x)a_{n+2}(x)\cdots a_{n+r}(x)\geq e^{\tau(x)(h(x)+\cdots+h(T^{n-1}(x)))} \end{align*} $$

$n\in \mathbb {N}$

$\tau $

$a_{n}(x)$

$r,\tau (x)$

$h(x)$

We study Smale skew product endomorphisms (introduced in Mihailescu and Urbański [Skew product Smale endomorphisms over countable shifts of finite type. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. doi: 10.1017/etds.2019.31. Published online June 2019]) now over countable graph-directed Markov systems, and we prove the exact dimensionality of conditional measures in fibers, and then the global exact dimensionality of the equilibrium measure itself. Our results apply to large classes of systems and have many applications. They apply, for instance, to natural extensions of graph-directed Markov systems. Another application is to skew products over parabolic systems. We also give applications in ergodic number theory, for example to the continued fraction expansion, and the backward fraction expansion. In the end we obtain a general formula for the Hausdorff (and pointwise) dimension of equilibrium measures with respect to the induced maps of natural extensions ${\mathcal{T}}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$ of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$-maps $T_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}}$, for arbitrary $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}>1$.

Kifer, Peres, and Weiss proved in [A dimension gap for continued fractions with independent digits. Israel J. Math.124 (2001), 61–76] that there exists $c_{0}>0$, such that $\dim \unicode[STIX]{x1D707}\leq 1-c_{0}$ for any probability measure $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$, which makes the digits of the continued fraction expansion independent and identically distributed random variables. In this paper we prove that amongst this class of measures, there exists one whose dimension is maximal. Our results also apply in the more general setting of countable branched systems.

We establish various new results on a problem proposed by Mahler [Some suggestions for further research. Bull. Aust. Math. Soc.29 (1984), 101–108] concerning rational approximation to fractal sets by rational numbers inside and outside the set in question. Some of them provide a natural continuation and improvement of recent results of Broderick, Fishman and Reich, and Fishman and Simmons. A key feature is that many of our new results apply to more general, multi-dimensional fractal sets and require only mild assumptions on the iterated function system. Moreover, we provide a non-trivial lower bound for the distance of a rational number $p/q$ outside the Cantor middle-third set $C$ to the set $C$, in terms of the denominator $q$. We further discuss patterns of rational numbers in fractal sets. We highlight two of them: firstly, an upper bound for the number of rational (algebraic) numbers in a fractal set up to a given height (and degree) for a wide class of fractal sets; and secondly, we find properties of the denominator structure of rational points in ‘missing-digit’ Cantor sets, generalizing claims of Nagy and Bloshchitsyn.

Representations of the Cuntz algebra ${\mathcal{O}}_{N}$ are constructed from interval dynamical systems associated with slow continued fraction algorithms introduced by Giovanni Panti. Their irreducible decomposition formulas are characterized by using the modular group action on real numbers, as a generalization of results by Kawamura, Hayashi, and Lascu. Furthermore, a certain symmetry of such an interval dynamical system is interpreted as a covariant representation of the $C^{\ast }$-dynamical system of the “flip-flop” automorphism of ${\mathcal{O}}_{2}$.

In this work we deal with extreme value theory in the context of continued fractions using techniques from probability theory, ergodic theory and real analysis. We give an upper bound for the rate of convergence in the Doeblin–Iosifescu asymptotics for the exceedances of digits obtained from the regular continued fraction expansion of a number chosen randomly from $(0,1)$ according to the Gauss measure. As a consequence, we significantly improve the best known upper bound on the rate of convergence of the maxima in this case. We observe that the asymptotics of order statistics and the extremal point process can also be investigated using our methods.

We introduce and study skew product Smale endomorphisms over finitely irreducible shifts with countable alphabets. This case is different from the one with finite alphabets and we develop new methods. In the conformal context we prove that almost all conditional measures of equilibrium states of summable Hölder continuous potentials are exact dimensional and their dimension is equal to the ratio of (global) entropy and Lyapunov exponent. We show that the exact dimensionality of conditional measures on fibers implies global exact dimensionality of the original measure. We then study equilibrium states for skew products over expanding Markov–Rényi transformations and settle the question of exact dimensionality of such measures. We apply our results to skew products over the continued fraction transformation. This allows us to extend and improve the Doeblin–Lenstra conjecture on Diophantine approximation coefficients to a larger class of measures and irrational numbers.

In this paper we extend and generalize, up to a natural bound of the method, our previous work Badziahin and Zorin [‘Thue–Morse constant is not badly approximable’, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN 19 (2015), 9618–9637] where we proved, among other things, that the Thue–Morse constant is not badly approximable. Here we consider Laurent series defined with infinite products $f_{d}(x)=\prod _{n=0}^{\infty }(1-x^{-d^{n}})$, $d\in \mathbb{N}$, $d\geq 2$, which generalize the generating function $f_{2}(x)$ of the Thue–Morse number, and study their continued fraction expansion. In particular, we show that the convergents of $x^{-d+1}f_{d}(x)$ have a regular structure. We also address the question of whether the corresponding Mahler numbers $f_{d}(a)\in \mathbb{R}$, $a,d\in \mathbb{N}$, $a,d\geq 2$, are badly approximable.

Let 𝔽q be the finite field of q elements. An analogue of the regular continued fraction expansion for an element α in the field of formal Laurent series over 𝔽q is given uniquely by

$$\alpha = A_0(\alpha ) + \displaystyle{1 \over {A_1(\alpha ) + \displaystyle{1 \over {A_2(\alpha ) + \ddots }}}},$$

$(A_{n}(\alpha))_{n=0}^{\infty}$

$$\vert A_1(\alpha ) \ldots A_N(\alpha )\vert ^{1/N} = q^{q/(q - 1)} + o(N^{ - 1/2}(\log N)^{3/2 + {\rm \epsilon }})$$

We establish a combinatorial realization of continued fractions as quotients of cardinalities of sets. These sets are sets of perfect matchings of certain graphs, the snake graphs, that appear naturally in the theory of cluster algebras. To a continued fraction $[a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n}]$ we associate a snake graph ${\mathcal{G}}[a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n}]$ such that the continued fraction is the quotient of the number of perfect matchings of ${\mathcal{G}}[a_{1},a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n}]$ and ${\mathcal{G}}[a_{2},\ldots ,a_{n}]$. We also show that snake graphs are in bijection with continued fractions. We then apply this connection between cluster algebras and continued fractions in two directions. First we use results from snake graph calculus to obtain new identities for the continuants of continued fractions. Then we apply the machinery of continued fractions to cluster algebras and obtain explicit direct formulas for quotients of elements of the cluster algebra as continued fractions of Laurent polynomials in the initial variables. Building on this formula, and using classical methods for infinite periodic continued fractions, we also study the asymptotic behavior of quotients of elements of the cluster algebra.

In 1939, Erdös and Mahler [‘Some arithmetical properties of the convergents of a continued fraction’, J. Lond. Math. Soc. (2)14 (1939), 12–18] studied some arithmetical properties of the convergents of a continued fraction. In particular, they raised a conjecture related to continued fractions and Liouville numbers. In this paper, we shall apply the theory of linear forms in logarithms to obtain a result in the direction of this problem.