Sails for universal quadratic forms

Abstract We establish a new connection between sails, a key notion in the geometric theory of generalised continued fractions, and arithmetic of totally real number fields, specifically, universal quadratic forms and additively indecomposable integers. Our main application is to biquadratic fields, for which we show that if their signature rank is at least 3, then ranks of universal forms and numbers of indecomposables grow as a power of the discriminant. We also construct a family in which these numbers grow only logarithmically.