Tiling Representations of Zeckendorf Decompositions

Abstract

Zeckendorf’s theorem states that every positive integer can be decomposed uniquely into a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers (where f1 = 1 and f2 = 2). Previous work by Grabner and Tichy (1990) and Miller and Wang (2012) has found a generalization of Zeckendorf’s theorem to a larger class of recurrent sequences, called Positive Linear Recurrence Sequences (PLRS’s). We apply well-known tiling interpretations of recurrence sequences from Benjamin and Quinn (2003) to PLRS’s. We exploit that tiling interpretation to create a new tiling interpretation specific to PLRS’s that captures the behavior of the generalized Zeckendorf’s theorem