Farey nets and multidimensional continued fractions (Q1207666)

The ordinary continued fraction algorithm can be defined using the Farey sequence, approximating a number by the endpoints of intervals which contain it. Analogously, we define a Farey net \(F_{n,m}\) be a triangulation of the set of all vectors \(({a_ 1 \over a_{n+1}},\dots, {a_ n \over a_{n+1}})\) with \(a_{n+1}\leq m\) into simplices of determinant \(\pm 1\), and use this algorithm to define a multidimensional continued fraction for a vector \(\eta\) in which the approximations are the vertices of the simplices containing \(\eta\) in a sequence of Farey nets. The concept of a Farey net was proposed by A. Hurwitz, and R. Mönkemeyer developed a specific continued fraction algorithm based on it. We show that Mönkemeyer's algorithm discovers dependencies among the coordinates of \(\eta\) in two dimensions, but that no continued fraction algorithm based on Farey nets can discover dependencies in three or more dimensions, and none can be strongly convergent (converging faster than a constant multiple of \(1/a_{n+1}\)), even in two dimensions.