I never thought I would give you permission to cut down that giant oak tree in the back of the property, the one that had led my grandfather to buy this land in the first place. It had been tall even when he’d seen it as a young man only a year into his first…
Month: June 2013
Factorials and the meaning of “is”
In a YouTube video, James Grime of NumberPhile makes the claim that the meaning of the factorial is \[n! = \prod_{i=1}^n i\] for n > 0, and proceeds to explain why 0! = 1 using a recursive proof. This echoes what Wolfram Mathworld has to say on the subject: “The factorial n! is defined for a…