From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In mathematics, the Pochhammer symbol

introduced by Leo August Pochhammer, has two different meanings.

It is used in the theory of special functions to represent the rising sequential product, sometimes called the ("rising factorial" or "upper factorial")

and it is used in combinatorics (Olver 1999, p. 101) to represent the falling sequential product (or "falling factorial" or "lower factorial")

To distinguish the two, the notations x⁽ⁿ⁾ and (x)_n are commonly used to denote the rising and falling sequential products, respectively. They are related by a difference in sign:

where the left-hand side is a rising sequential product and the right-hand side is a falling sequential product. This notation will be used below.

The two are related to the genuine factorial function by the formula:

The Pochhammer symbol has a generalized version called the generalized Pochhammer symbol, used in multivariate analysis. There is also a q-analogue, the q-Pochhammer symbol.

It is important to note, however, that (x)_n can also be used to denote the rising factorial.

Contents 1 Properties 2 Alternate notations 3 Relation to umbral calculus 4 Connection Coefficients 5 See also 6 Note 7 References

The empty products x⁽⁰⁾ and (x)₀ are defined to be 1 in both cases.

The rising and falling factorials can be expressed in terms of a binomial coefficient:

Thus a large number of identities on the binomial coefficients carry over to the Pochhammer symbols.

It follows from these expressions that the product of n consecutive integers is divisible by n!. Furthermore, the product of four consecutive integers is a perfect square minus one.

The rising factorial can be extended to real values of n using the Gamma function provided x and x + n are not negative integers:

as can the falling factorial:

Rising and falling factorials obey an equation similar to the binomial theorem:

where the coefficients are the same as the ones in the binomial expansion.

It is, of course, obvious that (a)⁽ⁿ⁾ = (a + n − 1)_n.

Another, less common notation was introduced by Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth and Oren Patashnik in their book Concrete Mathematics. They define, for the rising sequential product:

and for the falling sequential product:

Other notations for the falling sequential product include P(x, n), ^xP_n, P_x,n, or _xP_n. (See permutation and combination). An alternate notation for the rising sequential product (x)⁽ⁿ⁾ is the less common (x)⁺_(n).

Another notation of the falling sequential product using a function is:

where −h is the decrement and k is the number of terms. The rising sequential product is written:

The falling sequential product occurs in a formula which represents polynomials using the forward difference operator Δ and which is formally similar to Taylor's theorem of calculus. In this formula and in many other places, the falling sequential product (x)_k in the calculus of finite differences plays the role of x^k in differential calculus. Note for instance the similarity of

and

(where D denotes differentiation with respect to x). The study of similarities of this type is known as umbral calculus. The general theory covering such relations, including the Pochhammer polynomials, is given by the theory of polynomial sequences of binomial type and by Sheffer sequences.

Since the falling sequential products are a basis of the polynomial ring, we can re-express the product of two of them as a linear combination of falling sequential products:

The connection coefficients have a combinatorial interpretation as the number of ways to identify (or glue together) k elements from a set of size m and a set of size n.

Pochhammer k-symbol

Pochhammer actually used (x)_n to denote the binomial coefficient (Knuth 1992).

• Knuth, Donald E. (1992), "Two notes on notation", American Mathematical Monthly 99 (5): 403–422, doi:10.2307/2325085, arXiv:math/9205211.
• Olver, Peter J. (1999), Classical Invariant Theory, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521558212.