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The nth partial sum is given by a simple formula: = = (+). This equation was known to the Pythagoreans as early as the sixth century BCE. [5] Numbers of this form are called triangular numbers, because they can be arranged as an equilateral triangle.
A natural number is either 1 or n+1, where n is a natural number. Similarly recursive definitions are often used to model the structure of expressions and statements in programming languages. Language designers often express grammars in a syntax such as Backus–Naur form ; here is such a grammar, for a simple language of arithmetic expressions ...
The first ordinal number that is not a natural number is expressed as ω; this is also the ordinal number of the set of natural numbers itself. The least ordinal of cardinality ℵ 0 (that is, the initial ordinal of ℵ 0 ) is ω but many well-ordered sets with cardinal number ℵ 0 have an ordinal number greater than ω .
Many mathematical axioms are based upon recursive rules. For example, the formal definition of the natural numbers by the Peano axioms can be described as: "Zero is a natural number, and each natural number has a successor, which is also a natural number." [2] By this base case and recursive rule, one can generate the set of all natural numbers.
This characterization states that a function is primitive recursive if and only if there is a natural number m such that the function can be computed by a Turing machine that always halts within A(m,n) or fewer steps, where n is the sum of the arguments of the primitive recursive function. [5]
The successor function is part of the formal language used to state the Peano axioms, which formalise the structure of the natural numbers.In this formalisation, the successor function is a primitive operation on the natural numbers, in terms of which the standard natural numbers and addition are defined. [1]
Prefix sums are trivial to compute in sequential models of computation, by using the formula y i = y i − 1 + x i to compute each output value in sequence order. However, despite their ease of computation, prefix sums are a useful primitive in certain algorithms such as counting sort, [1] [2] and they form the basis of the scan higher-order function in functional programming languages.
The base case of the recursion could in principle be the sum of only one (or zero) numbers, but to amortize the overhead of recursion, one would normally use a larger base case. The equivalent of pairwise summation is used in many fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithms and is responsible for the logarithmic growth of roundoff errors in those ...