Prime Power Divisibility,Periodicity and Other Properties of Some Second Order Recurrences

Abstract

Wall published a paper in 1960 on the Fibonacci sequence where he derived many results concerning the period and prime power divisibility modulo m. His periodicity results have been generalized to second order linear recurrences. Here we study the sequences generated by such recurrences, with starting values of {0,1}: among other things, we derive new prime power divisibility results, derive the period by new methods, establish new identities, show derivations involving powers of matrices generated by these general recurrences, etc.