Playing a game of billiard with Fibonacci
Abstract
By making use of the greatest common divisor's ($gcd$) 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 $\tau$ and $\sigma$ corresponding to translations and mirroring we are able to rederive Lamé'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 $p,q\in \mathbb{N}$ with $gcd(q,p)=1$ and show that these also relate to the Fibonacci sequence.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- June 2019
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.1906.01911
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1906.01911
- Bibcode:
- 2019arXiv190601911J
- Keywords:
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- Mathematics - Dynamical Systems;
- Mathematics - Number Theory
- E-Print:
- 12 pages, 9 figures