Conjecture on period lengths of square roots of primes

Let pmp_{m} denote the mm-th prime, let TpmT_{p_{m}} be the period length of the continued fraction expansion of pm\sqrt{p_{m}}, and define

Wi:={p:Tp=i}.\mathcal{W}_{i}:=\{p:T_{p}=i\}.

Period-length distribution conjecture. For each iN+i\in\mathbb{N}_{+}, the limits

limN+W2i+2{p1,,pN}W2i{p1,,pN},limN+W2i+1{p1,,pN}W2i1{p1,,pN}\lim_{N\rightarrow +\infty}\frac{\mathcal{W}_{2i+2}\cap\{p_{1},\ldots,p_{N}\}}{\mathcal{W}_{2i}\cap\{p_{1},\ldots,p_{N}\}},\quad \lim_{N\rightarrow +\infty}\frac{\mathcal{W}_{2i+1}\cap\{p_{1},\ldots,p_{N}\}}{\mathcal{W}_{2i-1}\cap\{p_{1},\ldots,p_{N}\}}

exist and both are equal to 11. This conjecture is motivated by numerical data for primes up to the stated computational range; the source provides no proof or resolution.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Piotr Miska and Maciej Ulas, “On consecutive 1's in continued fractions expansions of square roots of prime numbers”, arXiv:1904.03404 (2019).

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