I have an assignment due for it on Monday. Could you guys help?
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Sigma notation is a convenient shorthand for writing out functions where you’re adding a bunch of numbers together.
You use a capital sigma, and you write a variable under the sigma and the ranges you’re adding it up from.
Let’s say you want to add every number from 1 to 100 together. You could write it as 1 + 2 + 3 + … + 99 + 100 and assume people know what you mean, or you could write it as
(n = 1) Sigma (100) n
That’s a much shorter way of writing “add n together for the values of n = 1 to n = 100”
Sigma notation comes up in calculus a lot for what are called infinite sums, for example:
(n = 1) Sigma (infinity) 1/2^n
Which is 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 +… and it equals 2
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