ON THE DENSITY OF HAUSDORFF DIMENSIONS OF BOUNDED TYPE CONTINUED FRACTION SETS: THE TEXAN CONJECTURE

Abstract

Given a non-empty finite subset A of the natural numbers, let EA denote the set of irrationals x∈[0,1] whose continued fraction digits lie in A. In general, EA is a Cantor set whose Hausdorff dimension dim (EA) is between 0 and 1. It is shown that the set [Formula: see text] intersects [0,1/2] densely. We then describe a method for accurately computing dimensions dim (EA), and employ it to investigate numerically the way in which [Formula: see text] intersects [1/2,1]. These computations tend to support the conjecture, first formulated independently by Hensley, and by Mauldin & Urbański, that [Formula: see text] is dense in [0,1]. In the important special case A={1,2}, we use our computational method to give an accurate approximation of dim (E{1,2}), improving on the one given in [18].