(An archive question of the week) In preparing the last couple posts, on recurrence relations, I ran across an answer to a much harder question, that illustrates what it can take to solve one that doesn’t fit the convenient forms. It’s linear, but the coefficients are not constant as they have been in all our …
A Challenging Homogeneous Second-Order Recurrence Read More »
Last week we looked at Ask Dr. Math questions about homogeneous linear recurrences; this time we’ll see some on simple (first-order) non-homogeneous recurrences, which will bring us back to the topic two weeks ago, when we looked at the examples of this type that a student had the most trouble with. This will be an …
Last week we looked at a recent question about recurrence relations, and I realized it needs a companion article to introduce these ideas. So here we will look at some answers from Ask Dr. Math about the simpler case, including general methods, why they work, and applications.
(A new question of the week) A recent question asked us to find errors in solving recurrence relations by the method of undetermined coefficients. We’ll see several things that can go wrong, and correct some misunderstandings.
Here is a recent question about arithmetic sequences and series (specifically, reversing the process to find the number of terms given the sum), that nicely illustrates a common type of interaction with a student: gathering information about both problem and student, then guiding them to use what they know, or giving new information as needed. …
We’ve been examining inductive proof in preparation for the Fibonacci sequence, which is a playground for induction. Here we’ll introduce the sequence, and then prove the formula for the nth term using two different methods, using induction in a way we haven’t seen before.