The modern theory of continued fractions comes from Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch physicist who invented the pendulum clock. Continued fractions turn out to be an especially elegant way of finding rational approximations of a number; this enabled him to design clocks with small gears that nonetheless provided the desired degree of accuracy.
Inspired by Tufts' gerrymandering school, I decided to take a stab at some of the math on my own. It turned out to be largely programming instead, but that ended up being interesting on its own.
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