English

Benford Behavior of Zeckendorf Decompositions

Number Theory 2014-09-02 v1

Abstract

A beautiful theorem of Zeckendorf states that every integer can be written uniquely as the sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers {Fi}i=1\{ F_i \}_{i = 1}^{\infty}. A set SZS \subset \mathbb{Z} is said to satisfy Benford's law if the density of the elements in SS with leading digit dd is log10(1+1d)\log_{10}{(1+\frac{1}{d})}; in other words, smaller leading digits are more likely to occur. We prove that, as nn\to\infty, for a randomly selected integer mm in [0,Fn+1)[0, F_{n+1}) the distribution of the leading digits of the Fibonacci summands in its Zeckendorf decomposition converge to Benford's law almost surely. Our results hold more generally, and instead of looking at the distribution of leading digits one obtains similar theorems concerning how often values in sets with density are attained.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.0482,
  title  = {Benford Behavior of Zeckendorf Decompositions},
  author = {Andrew Best and Patrick Dynes and Xixi Edelsbrunner and Brian McDonald and Steven J. Miller and K. Tor and Caroline Turnage-Butterbaugh and Madeleine Weinstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0482},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

Version 1.0, 12 pages, 1 figure