Find the number of strictly increasing sequences of nonnegative integers with the first term and the last term , and among any two consecutive terms, exactly one of them is even.
Saudi Arabian Mathematical Competitions, 2015
Solution
Let be the set of such sequences with the last term is instead of , and . We will show that is in fact the Fibonacci sequence and deduce that .
We can check easily that . For , we consider the second-last term of each sequence in . We have two cases.
Case 1. The second-last term is . Then we can leave out the last term to get an element of . Conversely, for each element of , we can add to the end to have an element of . Hence, in this case, we have sequences.
Case 2. The second-last term is at most . But and have the same parity, so the second-last term is at most . When we substitute the last term with , we have an element of . Conversely, if we replace in an element of by , we have an element of . Hence, in this case, we have sequences.
This proves that , and therefore is the Fibonacci sequence.