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Next: Illustrating and Discovering Some Up: Guessing Formulas Previous: Using Series

Using Matrices

Let's look at the previous sequence tex2html_wrap_inline548 another way. Make vectors out of pairs of adjacent elements,

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and find a matrix that transforms each vector into the next, using the ``Fibonacci'' nature of the sequence.

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In general,

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Let

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and calculate tex2html_wrap_inline776 by diagonalizing A

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So

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Therefore

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Exercise: Try to derive a formula for the ordinary Fibonacci sequence this way.



Carl Lee
Wed Jan 6 11:37:02 EST 1999