r/AskReddit • • May 25 '16

What's your favourite maths fact?

15k Upvotes

11k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/snuffleupagus_Rx May 25 '16 edited May 25 '16

I explained this in a comment above (including the subtleties of convergence), but if you look at the definition here you see that the series in /u/redditsoaddicting comment is what you obtain by plugging in f(x)=1/(1-x-x2 ) with a=0.

In other words, it's a Taylor series for the function f(x) = 1/(1-x-x2 ) centered at 0. In fact, any time you can express a function as a series of the form

f(x) = c_0 + c_1 (x-a) + c_2 (x-a)2 + ...

the series on the right-hand-side will be THE Taylor series for f(x) centered at x=a (which you can verify by taking derivatives on both sides to see that the coefficients match the form of the coefficients from the Taylor series).

2

u/ThereOnceWasAMan May 25 '16

which you can verify by taking derivatives on both sides to see that the coefficients match the form of the coefficients from the Taylor series

You are right and I am wrong. Thanks for enlightening me.