Multidimensional Continued Fractions

Book excerpt: Mathematician Fritz Schweiger, whose academic affiliation is not provided, provides an introduction to a field of research that has seen remarkable progress in recent decades, concentrating on multidimensional continued fractions which can be described by fractional linear maps or equivalently by a set of (n + 1) x (n + 1) matrices. Addressing the question of periodicity, he refines the problem of convergence to the question of whether these algorithms give "good" simultaneous Diophantine approximations. He notes that these algorithms are not likely to provide such "good" approximations which satisfy the n-dimensional Dirichlet property. Also studied are the ergodic properties of these maps. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR