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In mathematics, a series is, roughly speaking, an addition of infinitely many terms, one after the other. [1] The study of series is a major part of calculus and its generalization, mathematical analysis. Series are used in most areas of mathematics, even for studying finite structures in combinatorics through generating functions.
An infinite series of any rational function of can be reduced to a finite series of polygamma functions, by use of partial fraction decomposition, [8] as explained here. This fact can also be applied to finite series of rational functions, allowing the result to be computed in constant time even when the series contains a large number of terms.
For instance, the sequence 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, . . . is an arithmetic progression with a common difference of 2. If the initial term of an arithmetic progression is a 1 {\displaystyle a_{1}} and the common difference of successive members is d {\displaystyle d} , then the n {\displaystyle n} -th term of the sequence ( a n {\displaystyle a_{n ...
Informally, a sequence has a limit if the elements of the sequence become closer and closer to some value (called the limit of the sequence), and they become and remain arbitrarily close to , meaning that given a real number greater than zero, all but a finite number of the elements of the sequence have a distance from less than .
In mathematics, the limit of a sequence is the value that the terms of a sequence "tend to", and is often denoted using the symbol (e.g., ). [1] If such a limit exists and is finite, the sequence is called convergent. [2]
The same definition can be used for series = whose terms are not numbers but rather elements of an arbitrary abelian topological group.In that case, instead of using the absolute value, the definition requires the group to have a norm, which is a positive real-valued function ‖ ‖: + on an abelian group (written additively, with identity element 0) such that:
A sequence could be a finite sequence from a data source or an infinite sequence from a discrete dynamical system. Such a discrete function could be defined explicitly by a list (if its domain is finite), or by a formula for its general term, or it could be given implicitly by a recurrence relation or difference equation.
The Cauchy product may apply to infinite series [1] [2] or power series. [3] [4] When people apply it to finite sequences [5] or finite series, that can be seen merely as a particular case of a product of series with a finite number of non-zero coefficients (see discrete convolution). Convergence issues are discussed in the next section.