Monday, November 1, 2010

New paper. GPF-Tribonacci sequences

Starting with 5, 13, 7, each subsequent term is the greatest prime factor of the sum of the previous three terms. More about this type of sequences - in a new Fibonacci Quarterly article by Greg Back and Mihai Caragiu ("The Greatest Prime Factor and Recurrent Sequences" - Fibonacci Quarterly 48 (2010), no. 4, 358–362) - abstract here. 

In the main result on GPF-Fibonacci sequences (Theorem 3) we prove that all GPF-Fibonacci sequences (that is, prime sequences in which each subsequent term is the greatest prime factor of sum of the previous two terms) that are non-constant eventually enter the same 4-cycle 7,3,5,2.