Combinatorics leading to fibonacci sequence

229 Views Asked by At

I'm trying to generalize the problem that follows oif the number of stairs is "n", the problem is "You climb either 1 or 2 stairs at a time, at any given time. How many ways can you get up 11 stairs?"

Eventually I noticed that as I tried n = 1,2,3,4,5 the number of possible ways are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.... which is somehow resembling the fibonacci sequence... I tried to prove using pascal triangle since it is comnected to combinatorics and fibonacci but i dunno how to start... any idea?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

2
On

To climb $n$ stairs you can either climb $n-1$ stairs and step up one or climb $n-2$ stairs and step up two. If $A(n)$ is the number of ways to climb $n$ stairs, this says $A(n)=A(n-1)+A(n-2)$, which is exactly the Fibonacci recurrence.