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002 Overview PDF

The document describes a problem to find the sum of all even Fibonacci numbers below 4 million. It provides an initial program to directly check which numbers are even and sum them. It then explains that every third Fibonacci number is even, so the program is modified to only add every third number. Finally, it proves that the even Fibonacci numbers follow the recursive relationship F(n)=4F(n-3)+F(n-6), allowing an efficient way to calculate the desired sum without checking parities at each step.

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37 views

002 Overview PDF

The document describes a problem to find the sum of all even Fibonacci numbers below 4 million. It provides an initial program to directly check which numbers are even and sum them. It then explains that every third Fibonacci number is even, so the program is modified to only add every third number. Finally, it proves that the even Fibonacci numbers follow the recursive relationship F(n)=4F(n-3)+F(n-6), allowing an efficient way to calculate the desired sum without checking parities at each step.

Uploaded by

blazingarun
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Problem 2

Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the Fibonacci sequence
which do not exceed four million.

A direct translation of the problem statement would be a program like this:

limit=4000000
sum=0
a=1
b=1
while b<limit
if b mod 2=0 then sum=sum+b
h=a+b
a=b
b=h
output sum

Now let us see if we can get rid of the testing for even values.
Here is the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence with even numbers in red:

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 ...
a b c a b c a b c a b c

It is easy to prove that every third Fibonacci number is even.


It is not so difficult to change the program somewhat so that only every third number is
added:

limit=4000000
sum=0
a=1
b=1
c=a+b
while c<limit
sum=sum+c
a=b+c
b=c+a
c=a+b
output sum

There is another beautiful structure hidden beneath this problem:


If we only write the even numbers:
2 8 34 144...
it seems that they obey the following recursive relation: E(n)=4*E(n-1)+E(n-2).
If we can prove that for the Fibonacci numbers the formula F(n)=4*F(n-3)+F(n-6) holds we
have proven this recursion.

The proof is on the following page. Perhaps you want to try that yourself first.

Copyright Project Euler, further distribution without the consent of the author(s) prohibited
Author: hk
F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2)
= F(n-2)+F(n-3)+F(n-2)=2 F(n-2) + F(n-3)
= 2(F(n-3)+F(n-4))+F(n-3))=3 F(n-3) + 2 F(n-4)
= 3 F(n-3) + F(n-4) + F(n-5) + F(n-6)
= 4 F(n-3) + F(n-6)

In the forum several other schemes can be found to avoid the testing for the Fibonacci
numbers to be even. If you did not find your method in this overview you might have a look
there.

Copyright Project Euler, further distribution without the consent of the author(s) prohibited
Author: hk

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