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A formal power series can be loosely thought of as an object that is like a polynomial, but with infinitely many terms.Alternatively, for those familiar with power series (or Taylor series), one may think of a formal power series as a power series in which we ignore questions of convergence by not assuming that the variable X denotes any numerical value (not even an unknown value).
In mathematics, a power series (in one variable) is an infinite series of the form = = + + + … where represents the coefficient of the nth term and c is a constant called the center of the series. Power series are useful in mathematical analysis , where they arise as Taylor series of infinitely differentiable functions .
In mathematics, the power series method is used to seek a power series solution to certain differential equations. In general, such a solution assumes a power series with unknown coefficients, then substitutes that solution into the differential equation to find a recurrence relation for the coefficients.
Perturbation theory develops an expression for the desired solution in terms of a formal power series known as a perturbation series in some "small" parameter, that quantifies the deviation from the exactly solvable problem. The leading term in this power series is the solution of the exactly solvable problem, while further terms describe the ...
In a formal power series, the powers of the variable are used only as position-holders for the coefficients, so that the coefficient of is the fifth term in the sequence. In combinatorics, the method of generating functions uses formal power series to represent numerical sequences and multisets, for instance allowing concise expressions for ...
In mathematics and computer science, a rational series is a generalisation of the concept of formal power series over a ring to the case when the basic algebraic structure is no longer a ring but a semiring, and the indeterminates adjoined are not assumed to commute.
Unlike an ordinary series, the formal power series is not required to converge: in fact, the generating function is not actually regarded as a function, and the "variable" remains an indeterminate. One can generalize to formal power series in more than one indeterminate, to encode information about infinite multi-dimensional arrays of numbers.
A similar definition can be given for an -graded R-module over any commutative ring R in which each submodule of elements homogeneous of a fixed degree n is free of finite rank; it suffices to replace the dimension by the rank. Often the graded vector space or module of which the Hilbert–Poincaré series is considered has additional structure ...