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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).
Probability generating functions are often employed for their succinct description of the sequence of probabilities Pr(X = i) in the probability mass function for a random variable X, and to make available the well-developed theory of power series with non-negative coefficients.
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.
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.
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 ...
Logarithms: the inverses of exponential functions; useful to solve equations involving exponentials. Natural logarithm; Common logarithm; Binary logarithm; Power functions: raise a variable number to a fixed power; also known as Allometric functions; note: if the power is a rational number it is not strictly a transcendental function. Periodic ...
The ring of formal power series over the complex numbers is a UFD, but the subring of those that converge everywhere, in other words the ring of entire functions in a single complex variable, is not a UFD, since there exist entire functions with an infinity of zeros, and thus an infinity of irreducible factors, while a UFD factorization must be ...
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 ...