continued fractions and class number two持续的分数和两类数.pdfVIP

IJMMS 27:9 (2001) 565–571 PII. S0161171201010900 © Hindawi Publishing Corp. CONTINUED FRACTIONS AND CLASS NUMBER TWO RICHARD A. MOLLIN (Received 12 September 2000) Abstract. We use the theory of continued fractions in conjunction with ideal theory (often called the infrastructure) in real quadratic fields to give new class number 2 criteria and link this to a canonical norm-induced quadratic polynomial. By doing so, this provides a real quadratic field analogue of the well-known result by Hendy (1974) for complex quadratic fields. We illustrate with several examples. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 11R11, 11A55, 11R29. 1. Introduction. In [4], we gave criteria for real quadratic fields of ERD-type (those with discriminant of the form ∆ = 2 +r with r | 4) to have class number 2 in terms of a canonical quadratic polynomial, thus providing a real quadratic field analogue of a result of Hendy [2] for complex quadratic fields. Herein we give more general criteria for (not necessarily ERD type) real quadratic fields in terms of the same polynomial using the theory of the infrastructure. Moreover, we are able to handle certain ERD types that were not covered in [4]. 2. Notation and preliminaries. In this section, we see how ideal theory is linked to continued fractions via what the late Dan Shanks (see [6]) called the infrastructure of a real quadratic field. First we need the following notion. Definition 2.1. Suppose that D ∈ N is not a perfect square. Then a quadratic irrational is a number of the form P + √D α = , (P,Q ∈ Z), (2.1) Q where Q = 0 and P 2 ≡ D (mod Q). Also, the algebraic conjugate of