Mth 232 - Discrete Mathematics


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Here's a Mth 254 note which is relevant to Mth 232:
1996 Fall Mth 254 Of Rabbits, Graphs and Eigenvalues
PDF, 74 KB, 5 pages
Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, lived about 1170 to 1250. In 1202 he published the Liber Abaci in which he introduced Arabic, Arabic-Greek, and Hindu arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and the decimal place-value system to Europe. In the same text he introduced a model for the propogation of rabbits, a model which leads to the celebrated Fibonacci numbers. In this note we obtain the Binet formula for the Fibonacci numbers as an application of the notion of eigenvalues. As a second application of eigenvalues we see how to obtain formulae for the number of paths of a given length in a graph.

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