The Unreasonable Effectualness of Continued Function Expansions

Abstract

Many generalizations of continued fractions, where the reciprocal function has been replaced by a more general function, have been studied, and it is often asked whether such generalized expansions can have nice properties. For instance, we might ask that algebraic numbers of a given degree have periodic expansions, just as quadratic irrationals have periodic continued fractions; or we might ask that familiar transcendental constants such as $e$ or $\pi$ have periodic or terminating expansions. In this paper, we show that there exist such generalized continued function expansions with essentially any desired behavior.