Conjecture on period lengths of square roots of primes

About 7 years old · traced to

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 i∈N+i\in\mathbb{N}_{+}, the limits

lim⁡N→+∞W2i+2∩{p1,…,pN}W2i∩{p1,…,pN},lim⁡N→+∞W2i+1∩{p1,…,pN}W2i−1∩{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.

References

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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