Combinatorial structure of Sturmian words and continued fraction expansion of Sturmian numbers

Abstract: Let

h e t a = [0; a_{1}, a_{2}, d o t s]

be the continued fraction expansion of an irrational real number

h e t a i n (0, 1)

. It is well-known that the characteristic Sturmian word of slope

h e t a

is the limit of a sequence of finite words

(M_{k})_{k g e 0}

, with

M_{k}

of length

q_{k}

(the denominator of the

k

-th convergent to

h e t a

) being a suitable concatenation of

a_{k}

copies of

M_{k - 1}

and one copy of

M_{k - 2}

. Our first result extends this to any Sturmian word. Let

b g e 2

be an integer. Our second result gives the continued fraction expansion of any real number

x i

whose

b

-ary expansion is a Sturmian word

over the alphabet

0, b - 1

. This extends a classical result of B"ohmer who considered only the case where

is characteristic. As a consequence, we obtain a formula for the irrationality exponent of

x i

in terms of the slope and the intercept of

.

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