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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 sometimes defined with the 0! place omitted because it is always zero (sequence A007623 in the OEIS). In this article, a factorial number representation will be flagged by a subscript "!". In addition, some examples will have digits delimited by a colon. For example, 3:4:1:0:1:0! stands for
Multiplicative partitions of factorials are expressions of values of the factorial function as products of powers of prime numbers. They have been studied by Paul Erdős and others. [1] [2] [3] The factorial of a positive integer is a product of decreasing integer factors, which can in turn be factored into prime numbers.
When the variable is a positive integer, the number () is equal to the number of n-permutations from a set of x items, that is, the number of ways of choosing an ordered list of length n consisting of distinct elements drawn from a collection of size .
An alternative version uses the fact that the Poisson distribution converges to a normal distribution by the Central Limit Theorem. [5]Since the Poisson distribution with parameter converges to a normal distribution with mean and variance , their density functions will be approximately the same:
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] For any positive integers m and n, (m + n)! is a multiple of m! n!.
Since ! is the product of the integers 1 through n, we obtain at least one factor of p in ! for each multiple of p in {,, …,}, of which there are ⌊ ⌋.Each multiple of contributes an additional factor of p, each multiple of contributes yet another factor of p, etc. Adding up the number of these factors gives the infinite sum for (!
The ordinary factorial, when extended to the gamma function, has a pole at each negative integer, preventing the factorial from being defined at these numbers. However, the double factorial of odd numbers may be extended to any negative odd integer argument by inverting its recurrence relation!! = ()!! to give !! = (+)!! +.