Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 ia Paper 2 5B Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For the homogeneous linear recurrence relation, substitute . Its characteristic equation of a linear recurrence is , with roots and . Taking real linear combinations givesThese two real sequences are linearly independent: their values at form a matrix with determinant . Thus their two constants account uniquely for arbitrary first two values.
Let and reindex as . In , each term with has coefficientThe term is , and the remaining term is . This explicitly proves that is the required particular solution, a discrete Green convolution for the period-six recurrence.
The unit-response coefficients have the homogeneous form just found. The values give zero cosine coefficient and sine coefficient , soSubtracting this particular solution from any other solution leaves a homogeneous recurrence. Thus the complete answer is