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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.
Faà di Bruno's formula gives coefficients of the composition of two formal power series in terms of the coefficients of those two series. Equivalently, it is a formula for the nth derivative of a composite function. Lagrange reversion theorem for another theorem sometimes called the inversion theorem; Formal power series#The Lagrange inversion ...
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 ...
For x infinitesimal, the value of the formal power series (Taylor expansion) of exp is well defined and coincides with the inductive definition When x is given in Conway normal form, the set of exponents in the result is well-ordered and the coefficients are finite sums, directly giving the normal form of the result (which has a leading 1)
This article uses the coefficient extraction operator [] for formal power series, as well as the (labelled) operators (for cycles) and (for sets) on combinatorial classes, which are explained on the page for symbolic combinatorics. Given a combinatorial class, the cycle operator creates the class obtained by placing objects from the source ...
But it is wrong over the real numbers, since the series does not converge. However, in other contexts (e.g. working with 2-adic numbers, or with integers modulo a power of 2), the series does converge. The formal calculation implies that the last equation must be valid in those contexts. Another example is obtained by substituting q=-1.
The Hilbert–Poincaré series is a formal power series used to study graded algebras. Even if the limit of the power series is not considered, if the terms support appropriate structure then it is possible to define operations such as addition , multiplication , derivative , antiderivative for power series "formally", treating the symbol ...