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Conference rusure::math

Title:Mathematics at DEC
Moderator:RUSURE::EDP
Created:Mon Feb 03 1986
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:2083
Total number of notes:14613

1979.0. "Crux Mathematicorum 2040" by RUSURE::EDP (Always mount a scratch monkey.) Thu Jun 15 1995 10:40

    Proposed by Frederick Stern, San Jose State University, San Jose,
    California.
    
    Let a < b be positive integers, and let
    
    	    2^a-1
    	t = -----.
    	    2^b-1
    
    What is the relative frequency of 1's (versus 0's) in the binary
    expansion of t?
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name
DateLines
1979.1a/(b-a)FLOYD::YODERMFYMon Jun 19 1995 10:217
The binary expansion has period b, because

   b      b              a
  2 t = (2 - 1)t + t = (2 - 1) + t

so the expansion is an infinite repetition of (b-a) zeros followed by a ones.
Thus the answer is a/(b-a).