COMBINATORIAL MODELS I
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced; even a
proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
–John Keats
In Chapters 4 and 5, we studied several interesting applications of the Fibonacci and Lucas family to combinatorics, including the theory of partitioning. In this chapter, we will present additional applications to combinatorics.
In Section 4.2, we briefly studied compositions of positive integers n with summands 1 and 2. We found that the number of distinct compositions of n is
; see Table 14.1.
n | Compositions | ![]() |
1 | 1 | 1 |
2 | 1 + 1, 2 | 2 |
3 | 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 2, 2 + 1 | 3 |
4 | 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 1 + 2, 1 + 2 + 1, 2 + 1 + 1, 2 + 2 | 5 |
5 | 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 1 + 1 + 2, 1 + 1 + 2 + 1, 1 + 2 + 1 + 1, | 8 |
2 + 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 2, 2 + 2 + 1 | ||
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14.1 A FIBONACCI TILING MODEL
Theorem 4.1 has a spectacular combinatorial interpretation. To see this, suppose we would like to tile a board (an array of n unit squares) ...
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