Michael Goodrich et al provide a really clever algorithm in Data Structures and Algorithms in Java, for solving fibonacci recursively in linear time by returning an array of [fib(n), fib(n-1)].
public static long[] fibGood(int n) {
if (n < = 1) {
long[] answer = {n,0};
return answer;
} else {
long[] tmp = fibGood(n-1);
long[] answer = {tmp[0] + tmp[1], tmp[0]};
return answer;
}
}
This yields fib(n) = fibGood(n)[0].