Construction of uniformly bounded periodic continued fractions (Q1953841)

In this paper, Paul Mercat proves that there are infinitely many real quadratic fields \(K={\mathbb Q}(\sqrt {D})\) having the following property: There are infinitely many elements \(\xi\) in \(K\) such that all the partial quotients of the continued fraction expansion of \(\xi=[\overline{a_0, a_1, \dots , a_\xi}]\) are in \(\{1,2\}\). As a matter of fact, this is a corollary of the following result of the author: There exists an integer \(M_D\) and infinitely many elements \(\xi\) in \(K={\mathbb Q}(\sqrt {D})\) such that the continued fraction expansion of \(\xi\) is \([\overline{a_0, a_1, \dots , a_\xi}]\) with all the partial quotients \(a_i \leq M_D\). There are other interesting results to mention. The proofs are elementary, though technical, and the author contributes significant progress on some open conjectures of Zaremba and of McMullen.