Farey Sequences for Thin Groups

Abstract

Abstract The Farey sequence is the set of rational numbers with bounded denominator. We introduce the concept of a generalized Farey sequence. While these sequences arise naturally in the study of discrete and thin subgroups, they can be used to study interesting number theoretic sequences—for example rationals whose continued fraction partial quotients are subject to congruence conditions. We show that these sequences equidistribute and the gap distribution converges and answer an associated problem in Diophantine approximation. Moreover, for one example, we derive an explicit formula for the gap distribution. For this example, we construct the analogue of the Gauss measure, which is ergodic for the Gauss map. This allows us to prove a theorem about the associated Gauss–Kuzmin statistics.