Counting climbs of n steps in strides of one or two
Question
Someone walks up a staircase of steps, and each stride covers either one step or two steps. How many different stride sequences take them from the bottom to exactly the top?
Short answer
, the -th Fibonacci number (with ). The last stride starts from step or step , so the count satisfies with , , giving
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.2 Combinatorial Analysis, 'Hopping rabbit', p.65; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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