Chords of an ellipse, Lucas polynomials, and cubic equations

DOI10.1080/00029890.2020.1785253MaRDI QIDQ5124648zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Ben Blum-Smith, Japheth Wood

Publication date 30 September 2020

Published in The American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00492

zbMATH Keywords

generalized Lucas polynomialsCardano's methodroots of the Lucas polynomials

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Fibonacci and Lucas numbers and polynomials and generalizations (11B39) History of mathematics in the 15th and 16th centuries, Renaissance (01A40) Elementary problems in Euclidean geometries (51M04)

Abstract: A beautiful theorem of Thomas Price links the Fibonacci numbers and the Lucas polynomials to the plane geometry of an ellipse, generalizing a classic problem about circles. We give a brief history of the circle problem, an account of Price's ellipse proof, and a reorganized proof, with some new ideas, designed to situate the result within a dense web of connections to classical mathematics. It is inspired by Cardano's solution of the cubic equation and Newton's theorem on power sums, and yields an interpretation of generalized Lucas polynomials in terms of the theory of symmetric polynomials. We also develop additional connections that surface along the way; e.g., we give a parallel interpretation of generalized Fibonacci polynomials, and we show that Cardano's method can be used write down the roots of the Lucas polynomials.

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Cited in

(2)

• A Cosine Product Identity
• Polynomials, Ellipses, and Matrices: Two Questions, One Answer

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