Continued fraction expansions of rational expressions with irreducible denominators in characteristic 2 (Q580415)

The authors prove that for a certain class of rational functions p/q in x over a field of characteristic 2, the continued fraction expansion has only partial quotients of degree 1. The main result is: for each irreducible q of degree n, there are exactly 2 polynomials p of degree \(<n\), such that p/q is as sketched above (equivalently: in the Euclidean algorithm to calculate the gcd of p and q, the degrees of the remainders go down by 1 at each step). The proof is straightforward and uses some results on the coefficients in the formal power series in \(x^{-1}\) of p/q.