Billiards on pythagorean triples and their Minkowski functions

Abstract

It has long been known that the set of primitive pythagorean triples can be enumerated by descending certain ternary trees. We unify these treatments by considering hyperbolic billiard tables in the Poincare disk model. Our tables have m>=3 ideal vertices, and are subject to the restriction that reflections in the table walls are induced by matrices in the triangle group PSU^\pm_{1,1}\Zbb[i]. The resulting billiard map \tilde B acts on the de Sitter space x_1^2+x_2^2-x_3^2=1, and has a natural factor B on the unit circle, the pythagorean triples appearing as the B-preimages of fixed points. We compute the invariant densities of these maps, and prove the Lagrange and Galois theorems: A complex number of unit modulus has a preperiodic (purely periodic) B-orbit precisely when it is quadratic (and isolated from its conjugate by a billiard wall) over Q(i). Each B as above is a (m-1)-to-1 orientation-reversing covering map of the circle, a property shared by the group character T(z)=z^{-(m-1)}. We prove that there exists a homeomorphism Phi, unique up to postcomposition with elements in a dihedral group, that conjugates B with T; in particular Phi -- whose prototype is the classical Minkowski question mark function -- establishes a bijection between the set of points of degree <=2 over Q(i) and the torsion subgroup of the circle. We provide an explicit formula for Phi, and prove that Phi is singular and Holder continuous with exponent log(m-1) divided by the maximal periodic mean free path in the associated billiard table.