The diophantine equation
We make more accessible a neglected simple continued fraction based algorithm due to Lagrange, for deciding the solubility of in relatively prime integers , where , gcd is not a perfect square. In the case of solubility, solutions with least positive y, from each equivalence class, are also constructed. Our paper is a generalisation of an earlier paper by the author on the equation . As in that paper, we use a lemma on unimodular matrices that gives a much simpler proof than Lagrange’s for...