English

Playing a game of billiard with Fibonacci

Dynamical Systems 2019-06-06 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

By making use of the greatest common divisor's (gcdgcd) properties we can highlight some connections between playing billiard inside a unit square and the Fibonacci sequence as well as the Euclidean algorithm. In particular by defining two maps τ\tau and σ\sigma corresponding to translations and mirroring we are able to rederive Lam\'{e}'s theorem and to equip it with a geometric interpretation realizing a new way to construct the golden ratio. Further we discuss distributions of the numbers p,qNp,q\in \mathbb{N} with gcd(q,p)=1gcd(q,p)=1 and show that these also relate to the Fibonacci sequence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.01911,
  title  = {Playing a game of billiard with Fibonacci},
  author = {Daniel Jaud},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01911},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

12 pages, 9 figures