Sunday, 25 June 2017

Long form of an arithmetic sequence formula



I've been studying arithmetic sequences and am finding that I can do the formulas, but can't truly understand until I can do a long-form version of the formula.



Let's take the below:




a5 = 2+2(5-1)



I can do 2+2+2+2+2 to get to 10 or following the sequence step by step I can do 2,4,6,8,10. But how would I calculate these answers on something like a basic calculator?



Edit: In case unclear, I'm asking for the non-formulaic version to calculate what, given the above, would write as an = a1 + d (n - 1).



Edit 2: Okay, say I give you any arithmetic sequence formula such as shown above, and I hand you a calculator as basic as the one shown in this image. How do you solve it? You don't just do a1 + a2 + a3 ... ad infinitum. How do you solve for it? All the more advanced calculators and services online provide none of the step-by-step process, so you get the final answer without understanding a thing, and there has to be a more effective way than just adding or subtracting to the nth term.



Basic image of calculator



Answer



So the formula an=a1+d(n1)

is the explicit formula, or closed form. You don't need to calculate a4 to calculate a5. For example if we have the same formula as you have in your post, an=2+2(n1) then if you want to calculate a10 you just plug in 10 to the equation and compute it using a calculator if you like a10=2+2(101)


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