Exam 1 Study Guide

Here are a few comments about the exam:

• Your exam will cover the material through Fibonacci numbers. Unfortunately I will be out of town (and mostly out of email contact) from Friday on, so please email me with questions NOW!

• You should have done all the assigned reading: you will be responsible for the content, even if we have not explicitly studied it in class. I will put a few modest questions on the exam, to check to see if you did your reading.

• Games:
  • Let's make a deal!
  • The birthday game
  • The games in your homework

• Bases:
  • The Binary card trick -- you need to be able to play this.
  • Lewis Carroll's Alice's strange math
  • Bases (place values, "binimals" -- decimal numbers in other bases, etc.)
    • Be able to convert between bases
    • Be able to do arithmetic (sums) in different bases

• Historical:
  • Relate this to the binary card trick.
  • Egyptian multiplications
  • Egyptian division
  • The Rhind Papyrus and unit fractions
  • Babylonian Mathematics

• Prime numbers and the prime factorization theorem

• Fibonacci Numbers:
  • The Recurrence Relation that generates the Fibonaccis
  • The Rabbit Problem
  • Other Fibonacci Numerical Patterns in Nature
  • Nim -- be able to play to win!
  • Fibonacci Spirals
  • Golden mean
  • Golden rectangle