show/hide this revision's text 1 [made Community Wiki]

Here is another example from dynamical systems. As has already been explained in some other posts, the fine structure of dynamical systems often depends on subtle number-theoretic properties of some involved constants.

Assume you have a domain $G\subseteq\mathbb{C}$ and a holomorphic map $f\colon G\to G$ with a fixed point $z\in G$, and you want to study how successive iterates of $f$ around $z$ behave. For sake of simplicity assume that $z=0$. Now locally around $0$ we can approximate $f$ by a linear function $\zeta\mapsto a\zeta$ where $a=f'(0)$, so a simple heuristic says that if we want to understand high powers of $f$, we should understand high powers of $a$. It is then quite clear that the only interesting case is $|a|=1$, so let us assume $a=\mathrm{exp}2\pi it$. Then there are some relations between the growth of the entries in the continued fraction expansion of $t$ and the behaviour of $f$ around $z=0$ under iteration.

You can read more about this in the book "Complex Dynamics in one Variable" by John Milnor. Keywords are Siegel disks and Brjuno numbers.