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Concept
Arithmetic progression
Summary
An arithmetic progression or arithmetic sequence ( ()) is a sequence of numbers such that the difference from any succeeding term to its preceding term remains constant throughout the sequence. The constant difference is called common difference of that arithmetic progression. For instance, the sequence 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, . . . is an arithmetic progression with a common difference of 2.
If the initial term of an arithmetic progression is and the common difference of successive members is , then the -th term of the sequence () is given by:
A finite portion of an arithmetic progression is called a finite arithmetic progression and sometimes just called an arithmetic progression. The sum of a finite arithmetic progression is called an arithmetic series.
According to an anecdote of uncertain reliability, young Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was in primary school, reinvented this method to compute the sum of the integers from 1 through 100, by multiplying n/2 pairs of numbers in the sum by the values of each pair n + 1. However, regardless of the truth of this story, Gauss was not the first to discover this formula, and some find it likely that its origin goes back to the Pythagoreans in the 5th century BC. Similar rules were known in antiquity to Archimedes, Hypsicles and Diophantus; in China to Zhang Qiujian; in India to Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara II; and in medieval Europe to Alcuin, Dicuil, Fibonacci, Sacrobosco
and to anonymous commentators of Talmud known as Tosafists.
Computation of the sum 2 + 5 + 8 + 11 + 14. When the sequence is reversed and added to itself term by term, the resulting sequence has a single repeated value in it, equal to the sum of the first and last numbers (2 + 14 = 16). Thus 16 × 5 = 80 is twice the sum.
The sum of the members of a finite arithmetic progression is called an arithmetic series. For example, consider the sum:
This sum can be found quickly by taking the number n of terms being added (here 5), multiplying by the sum of the first and last number in the progression (here 2 + 14 = 16), and dividing by 2:
In the case above, this gives the equation:
This formula works for any real numbers and .
Official source
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