Related papers: Fibonacci Plays Billiards
Fix a nonnegative integer $d$, a field $\mathbb{F}$, and a vector space $V$ over $\mathbb{F}$ with dimension $d+1$. Let $T$ denote an invertible upper triangular matrix in ${\rm Mat}_{d+1}(\mathbb{F})$. Using $T$ we construct three flags on…
Unlabelled Necklaces are an equivalence class of cyclic words under both the rotation (cyclic shift) and the relabelling operations. The relabelling of a word is a bijective mapping from the alphabet to itself. The main result of the paper…
The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…
Some distinguished types of voters, as vetoers, passers or nulls, as well as some others, play a significant role in voting systems because they are either the most powerful or the least powerful voters in the game independently of the…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result holds for other positive linear recurrence sequences. These legal decompositions can be used to…
Let $F_n(k)$ be the generalized Fibonacci number defined by (with $F_i(k)$ abbreviated to $F_i$): $F_n = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2} + \dots + F_{n-k}$, for $n \geq k$, and the initial values $(F_0,F_1,...,F_{k-1})$. Let $B_n(k,j)$ be $F_n(k)$ with…
A billiard is a dynamical system in which a particle alternates between motion in a straight line and specular reflection from a boundary. For billiards in non-convex areas bounded by segments of confocal quadrics are studied. The topology…
Let $\epsilon\in \{-1,1\}$. A sequence of prime numbers $p_1, p_2, p_3, ...$, such that $p_i=2p_{i-1}+\epsilon$ for all $i$, is called a {\it Cunningham chain} of the first or second kind, depending on whether $\epsilon =1$ or -1…
The following magic trick is at the center of this paper. While the audience writes the first ten terms of a Fibonacci-like sequence (the sequence following the same recursion as the Fibonacci sequence), the magician calculates the sum of…
A right triangular billiard system is equivalent to the system of two colliding particles confined in a one-dimensional box. In spite of their seeming simplicity, no definite conclusion has been drawn so far concerning their ergodic…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
In the last 30 years, the mathematical theory of aperiodic order has developed enormously. Many new tilings and properties have been discovered, few of which are covered or anticipated by the early papers and books. Here, we start from the…
In a linear chord diagram a short chord is one which joins adjacent vertices. We define a bubble to be a region in a linear chord diagram devoid of short chords. We derive a formal generating function counting bubbles by their size and find…
As is well-known, the ratio of adjacent Fibonacci numbers tends to phi = (1 + sqrt(5))/2, and the ratio of adjacent Tribonacci numbers (where each term is the sum of the three preceding numbers) tends to the real root eta of X^3 - X^2 - X -…
The Fibonacci numbers are familiar to all of us. They appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much there is an entire journal and a sequence of conferences dedicated to their study. However, there is also another sequence of numbers…
A bijective proof is given for the following theorem: the number of compositions of n into odd parts equals the number of compositions of n + 1 into parts greater than one. Some commentary about the history of partitions and compositions is…
In this paper we investigate enumeration of some classes of $n$-character strings and binary necklaces. Recall that binary necklaces are necklaces in two colors with length $n$. We prove three results (Theorems 1, 1' and 2) concerning the…
A binary triangle of size $n$ is a triangle of zeroes and ones, with $n$ rows, built with the same local rule as the standard Pascal triangle modulo $2$. A binary triangle is said to be balanced if the absolute difference between the…
The billiard table is modeled as an $n$-dimensional box $[0,a_1]\times [0,a_2]\times \ldots \times [0,a_n] \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, with each side having real-valued lengths $a_i$ that are pairwise commensurable. A ball is launched from the…
We give an optical physicist view of the problem of the trajectories in a polygonal billiard using only basic facts of Optics and the theory of functions of a complex variable. This approach allow us to stablish a certain correspondence…