The structure of base phi expansions

Publication date: 15 May 2023

Abstract: In the base phi expansion any natural number is written uniquely as a sum of powers of the golden mean with coefficients 0 and 1, where it is required that the product of two consecutive digits is always 0. We tackle the problem of describing how these expansions look like. We classify the positive parts of the base phi expansions according to their suffices, and the negative parts according to their prefixes, specifying the sequences of occurrences of these digit blocks. Here the situation is much more complex than for the Zeckendorf expansions, where any natural number is written uniquely as a sum of Fibonacci numbers with coefficients 0 and 1, where, again, it is required that the product of two consecutive digits is always 0. In a previous work we have classified the Zeckendorf expansions according to their suffices. It turned out that if we consider the suffices as labels on the Fibonacci tree, then the numbers with a given suffix in their Zeckendorf expansion appear as generalized Beatty sequences in a natural way on this tree. We prove that the positive parts of the base phi expansions are a subsequence of the sequence of Zeckendorf expansions, giving an explicit formula in terms of a generalized Beatty sequence. The negative parts of the base phi expansions no longer appear lexicographically. We prove that all allowed digit blocks appear, and determine the order in which they do appear.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Radix representation; digital problems (11A63) Fibonacci and Lucas numbers and polynomials and generalizations (11B39) Other number representations (11A67)

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