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The word "factorial" (originally French: factorielle) was first used in 1800 by Louis François Antoine Arbogast, [18] in the first work on Faà di Bruno's formula, [19] but referring to a more general concept of products of arithmetic progressions. The "factors" that this name refers to are the terms of the product formula for the factorial. [20]
The factorial number system is a mixed radix numeral system: the i-th digit from the right has base i, which means that the digit must be strictly less than i, and that (taking into account the bases of the less significant digits) its value is to be multiplied by (i − 1)!
(Here we use the standard notations and conventions of lambda calculus: Y is a function that takes one argument f and returns the entire expression following the first period; the expression . ( ) denotes a function that takes one argument x, thought of as a function, and returns the expression ( ), where ( ) denotes x applied to itself ...
The factorial of a non-negative integer n, denoted by n!, is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n. For example, 5! = 5×4×3×2×1 = 120. By convention, the value of 0! is defined as 1. This classical factorial function appears prominently in many theorems in number theory. The following are a few of these theorems. [1]
De Polignac's formula; Difference operator; Difference polynomials; Digamma function; Egorychev method; Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem; Euler–Mascheroni constant; Faà di Bruno's formula; Factorial; Factorial moment; Factorial number system; Factorial prime; Gamma distribution; Gamma function; Gaussian binomial coefficient; Gould's sequence ...
(α) to most complex numbers z, this definition has the feature of working for all positive real values of α. Furthermore, when α = 1, this definition is mathematically equivalent to the Π(z) function, described above. Also, when α = 2, this definition is mathematically equivalent to the alternative extension of the double factorial.
The rising factorial is also integral to the definition of the hypergeometric function: The hypergeometric function is defined for | | < by the power series (,;;) = = () ()! provided that ,,, …. Note, however, that the hypergeometric function literature typically uses the notation ( a ) n {\displaystyle (a)_{n}} for rising factorials.
A classic example of recursion is the definition of the factorial function, given here in Python code: def factorial ( n ): if n > 0 : return n * factorial ( n - 1 ) else : return 1 The function calls itself recursively on a smaller version of the input (n - 1) and multiplies the result of the recursive call by n , until reaching the base case ...