Continued Fractions and Gauss' Class Number Problem for Real Quadratic Fields

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to present a numerical data which shows relations between real quadratic fields of class number 1 and a mysterious behavior of the period of simple continued fraction expansion of certain quadratic irrationals. For that purpose, we define a class number, a fundamental unit,a discriminant and a Yokoi invariant for a non-square positive integer, and then see that a generalization of theorems of Siegel and of Yokoi holds. These and a theorem of Friesen and Halter-Koch imply several interesting conjectures for solving Gauss' class number problem for real quadratic fields.