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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).
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.
The next formulas for powers, logarithms, and compositions of formal power series are expanded by these polynomials with variables in the coefficients of the original generating functions. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] The formula for the exponential of a generating function is given implicitly through the Bell polynomials by the EGF for these polynomials ...
In mathematical analysis, factorials are used in power series for the exponential function and other functions, and they also have applications in algebra, number theory, probability theory, and computer science. Much of the mathematics of the factorial function was developed beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The partial sums of a power series are polynomials, the partial sums of the Taylor series of an analytic function are a sequence of converging polynomial approximations to the function at the center, and a converging power series can be seen as a kind of generalized polynomial with infinitely many terms. Conversely, every polynomial is a power ...
The probability generating function is an example of a generating function of a sequence: see also formal power series. It is equivalent to, and sometimes called, the z-transform of the probability mass function.
This is an analytic function of q in the interior of the unit disk, and can also be considered as a formal power series in q. The special case ϕ ( q ) = ( q ; q ) ∞ = ∏ k = 1 ∞ ( 1 − q k ) {\displaystyle \phi (q)=(q;q)_{\infty }=\prod _{k=1}^{\infty }(1-q^{k})} is known as Euler's function , and is important in combinatorics , number ...
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 ...