Continued fractions and the Markoff tree (Q2372152)

The author gives a very clear proof of Markoff's characterization of the badly approximated numbers. The proof emphasizes Harvey Cohn's connection between the periods of appropriate continued fractions and words in the free group on two generators. There are two appendices: the first gives a crash course in continued fractions; the second reproves the uniqueness conjecture for primes powers and twice prime powers.