Frobenius Coin-Exchange Generating Functions
Abstract
We study variants of the Frobenius coin-exchange problem: given n positive relatively prime parameters, what is the largest integer that cannot be represented as a nonnegative integral linear combination of the given integers? This problem and its siblings can be understood through generating functions with 0/1 coefficients according to whether or not an integer is representable. In the 2-parameter case, this generating function has an elegant closed form, from which many corollaries follow, including a formula for the Frobenius problem. We establish a similar closed form for the generating function indicating all integers with exactly k representations, with similar wide-ranging corollaries.
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