Lucas Numbers
Contents
Description
The Lucas numbers or Lucas series are an integer sequence named after the mathematician François Édouard Anatole Lucas (1842–91), who studied both that sequence and the closely related Fibonacci numbers.
Similar to the Fibonacci numbers, each Lucas number is defined to be the sum of its two immediately previous terms. However, unlike the Fibonacci numbers, which start as Lucas numbers start as .
The first few Lucas numbers are as follows: whose construction is as follows:
Fibonacci adding
As a recurrence relation, Lucas numbers are defined as
The ratio between two consecutive Lucas numbers converges to the golden ratio .
A Lucas Number Spiral
Applications In Nature
The golden ratio is found in nature everywhere you look. It is obtained by dividing a line into two parts such that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part:
The golden ratio
It is approximated as and denoted as
Interestingly enough, where is the floor function and is the Lucas number, but this function does not work for 1. This also means that the Lucas numbers can be derived from the golden ratio itself.
Finding Lucas Numbers
What is the Lucas number?
We have however, instead of working back, we can find it by using the relationship to .
We know that
So,
So, our final answer is