The Pleasures of Counting is a book about people working with mathematics and challenges they have faced. The book has 544 pages with a total of 19 chapters and 3 appendices. It contains a lot of material and is split into five parts: The uses of abstraction, Meditations on measurement, The pleasures of computation, Enigma [...]
Archives for November 2009
Continued Fractions and Continuants
We will be considering continued fractions of the form
a_0 + \displaystyle\frac{1}{a_1 + \displaystyle\frac{1}{\ddots + \displaystyle\frac{1}{a_{n-1} + \displaystyle\frac{1}{a_n}}}}
where the a_k‘s are real numbers called the partial quotients [...]
