For those gifted with mathematical sequences...

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digitaloracle

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I recent;y encountered this sequence: 1,2,6,24,120,720 and was asked to find it's recursive definition, which I found to be

Any term = (place in sequence) * (term before it)

I am currently trying to find it's explicit definition, and am having problems doing so. Could anyone solve this and explain their logic?
 
1 two times is 2, 2 three times is 6, 6 four times is 24, 24 five times is 120, 120 six times is 720.... funno if thats what youre looking for but im pretty sure its the pattern :confused:



EDIT: if anything "any term = itself * place in sequence not including one.... or something wacky lol. i never did anything past trig and the trig was teaching myself at a joke of a school for losers like me that got drunk and never went to schoool so obviously i slacked
 
I'm not sure what you mean by explicit definition, but writing a factorial function recursively would be like this: (pseudocode)

main() {
int result;
result = factorial(7);
}

int factorial(int n) {
if (n<=2) {
return 2;
} else {
return n * factorial(n-1);
}
}

The idea being that if you can find the factorial of n-1, you can find the factorial of n. The function continues executing itself over and over again until it hits n=2, at which point it returns 2! (which equals 2) and continues to plug the factorials of n-1 into the expression that called the function until it returns to n.

Hope this helped. :)
 
So effectivly your saying that you want some equaion which will allow you to put in a position you want and give you a numerical output.

Since this is recursive thats very very hard to do - some would call it impossible.

I really hope thats not what yor after.
 
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