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This was a surprising pair of identities I stumbled on in college.

and

So, for example, with a=10 and b=2,

I don’t remember the source of the question, but I suspect it was someone with knowledge of this relation.

I’m very curious whether this is part of a larger class of mathematical expressions involving roots that can be simplified.

Here’s a proof:

 

 

 

 

 

Solving for m and n:

Interestingly, this can be used in a telescoping identity when a=k, b=1:

I was curious about whether Fibonacci-like sequences could converge to 0, with a proper choice of starting terms and the usual recurrence relationship:

It turns out that they can, if the ratio of the second term to the first is , or 1-φ, approximately -0.618.

I found this using the closed form for Fibonacci-like sequences

and solving for .

Here are the first few elements of the sequence:

Interestingly, the integer part are the Lucas numbers and the multiples of the square root are the Fibonacci numbers, and their ratio converges to the square root of 5, based on their closed forms.

If you know what sample correlation is, you might enjoy Cor: A Sample Correlation Game, which is available here

As I’m using Revision B, I ended up downloading source to a mount point on the sdcard (/mnt/sdcard) as it’s too easy to fill up the 2GB root device otherwise.

Download and unpack truecrypt-7.1a-source

Download and unpack wxWidgets

export SDCARD=/mnt/sdcard
cd ${SDCARD}
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wxwindows/wxWidgets-2.8.12.tar.gz
tar xvfz wxWidgets-2.8.12.tar.gz
export WX_HOME=${SDCARD}/wxWidgets-2.8.12/

Download PKCS11 headers

mkdir ${SDCARD}/pkcs
cd ${SDCARD}
wget 'ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs*.h'
export PKCS11_INC=${SDCARD}/pkcs

Build truecrypt

cd ${SDCARD}/truecrypt-7.1a-source
make NOGUI=1 WX_ROOT=${WX_HOME} wxbuild
make NOGUI=1 WXSTATIC=1

Copy the binary to the system

sudo cp Main/truecrypt /usr/bin
chown bin.bin /usr/bin/truecrypt
chmod 0755 /usr/bin/truecrypt

I recently upgraded to MediaWiki 1.21 for my personal wiki, and I was annoyed to see that LaTeX support was removed, though it and MathJax are available as extensions.

Once I installed it, I was vexed by sporadic failures in typesetting — texvc would succeed in producing an image about 20% of the time.

Eventually, I found out why — the memory limits on the wfShellExec call were set pretty low, and so most of the time it would fail to malloc the memory it needed.

Increasing the global default for shell calls in LocalSettings.php fixed this:

$wgMaxShellMemory = 402400;

If you’re having the same problem, give it a try.