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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 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]
Lisp is a family of programming languages loosely inspired by mathematical notation and Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. Some dialects, such as Common Lisp, are primarily imperative but support functional programming. Others, such as Scheme, are designed for functional programming. In Scheme, the factorial function can be defined as follows:
The importance of primitive recursive functions lies in the fact that most computable functions that are studied in number theory (and more generally in mathematics) are primitive recursive. For example, addition and division, the factorial and exponential function, and the function which returns the nth prime are all primitive recursive. [1]
General mathematics defines a function based on its extensional properties. [3] That is, two functions are equal if they perform the same mapping. Lambda calculus and programming languages regard function identity as an intensional property. A function's identity is based on its implementation.
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)!
Let be a natural number. For a base >, we define the sum of the factorials of the digits [5] [6] of , :, to be the following: = =!. where = ⌊ ⌋ + is the number of digits in the number in base , ! is the factorial of and
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.