The Fibonacci Sequence

The Liber Abaci’s Rabbit Problem

It is ironic that Fibonacci is remembered today mainly because a nineteenth century French number theorist,
Edouard Lucas, attached his name to a sequence that appeared in a trivial problem in the Liber Abaci. Fibonacci
posed the following problem dealing with the number of offspring of a pair of rabbits.

A man put one pair of rabbits in a certain place entirely surrounded by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from
that pair in a year, if the nature of these rabbits is such that every month each pair bears a new pair which from the second month
on becomes productive?

On the basis that none of the rabbits die, a pair is born during the first month, so that there are two pairs present.
During the second month, the original pair has produced another pair. One month later, both the original pair and the
firstborn pair have produced new pairs, so that two adult and three young pairs are present, and so on. The figures
are tabulated in the chart.

The point to remember is that each month the young pairs grow up and become adult pairs, making the new
“adult” entry the previous one plus the previous “young” entry.
Each of the pairs that was adult last month produces one young pair, so that the new young entry is equal to
the previous adult entry.
When continued indefinitely, the sequence
1; 1; 2; 3; 5; 8; 13; 21; 34; 55; 89; 144; 233; 377; : : :
is called the Fibonacci sequence and its terms the Fibonacci numbers. If we let Fn denote the nth Fibonacci number,
then we can write this remarkable sequence as follows:
2 = 1 + 1 or F3 = F1 + F2;
3 = 1 + 2 or F4 = F2 + F3;
5 = 2 + 3 or F5 = F3 + F4;
8 = 3 + 5 or F6 = F4 + F5;
: :
: :
In general, the rule for information is easily discernible:

F1 = F2 = 1; Fn + Fn-2 C Fn-1 for n ≥ 3:

That is, each term in the sequence (after the second) is the sum of the two that immediately precede it. Such
sequences, in which from a certain point forward every term can be represented as a linear combination of preceding
terms, are “recursive sequences.” The Fibonacci sequence is one of the earliest recursive sequences in mathematical
work. Fibonacci himself was probably aware of the recursive nature of his sequence, but not until 1634—by which
time mathematical notation had made sufficient progress—did Albert Girard write the formula in his posthumously
published work L’Arithmetique de Simon Stevin de Bruges.
It may not have escaped your attention that successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence are relatively prime. We will
establish this fact next.

T H E O R EM No two consecutive Fibonacci numbers Fn and FnC1 have a factor d > 1 in common.

Proof. Suppose that d > 1 divides Fn and FnC1. Then their difference Fn+1 - Fn = Fn-1 will also be divisible by d. From
this and the formula Fn - Fn_1 = Fn-2, it can be concluded that d│Fn-2. Working backward, we can show that Fn-3,
Fn-4; : : : ; and finally F1 are all divisible by d. But F1 = 1, which is certainly not divisible by any d > 1. This
contradiction invalidates our supposition and therefore proves the theorem.