Thursday, 8 August 2013

Is there a general formula for the sum of a quadratic sequence?



I tried Googling "formula for sum of quadratic sequence", which did not give me anything useful. I just want an explicit formula for figuring out a sum for a quadratic sequence. For example, how would you figure out the sum of 2+6+12+20++210? Can someone please help? Thanks



For those of you who do not know, a quadratic sequence is a sequence where the differences of the differences between the terms are constant. Let's use 2+6+12+20+ as an example. The differences between the terms are 4, 6, 8, etc. The difference between the differences of the terms is 2. So the sequence will continue like 2+6+12+20+30+42+56+72+

Answer



Yes there is. Ever wonder why this is called quadratic sequence? Quadratic refers to squares right? This is just constant difference of difference. So where's the connection? Well as it turns out, all terms of a quadratic sequence are expressible by a quadratic polynomial. What do I mean? Consider this




tn=n+n2



Subsituiting n=1,2,3, generates your terms. By the way, 202 doesn't occur in this sequence, the 13th term is 182 and the 14th term is 210. I am assuming it was supposed to be 210.



So we need to find



ni=1i+i2=ni=1i+ni=1i2



where n=14. There are well known formulas for ni=1i and for ni=1i2. Substituting them, we get,



n(n+1)2+n(n+1)(2n+1)6
=n(n+1)2(1+2n+13)
=n(n+1)2(3+2n+13)
=n(n+1)2(2n+43)
=n(n+1)(n+2)3




where n=14. Thus our sum is 1120.


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