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In mathematics, a power series (in one variable) is an infinite series of the form = = + + + … where represents the coefficient of the nth term and c is a constant called the center of the series. Power series are useful in mathematical analysis , where they arise as Taylor series of infinitely differentiable functions .
In mathematics, the power series method is used to seek a power series solution to certain differential equations. In general, such a solution assumes a power series with unknown coefficients, then substitutes that solution into the differential equation to find a recurrence relation for the coefficients.
Laurent series are the complex-valued equivalent to Taylor series, but can be used to study the behavior of functions near singularities through infinite sums of more well understood functions, such as polynomials. A bounded function that is holomorphic in the entire complex plane must be constant; this is Liouville's theorem.
The convergence criteria of the power series then apply, requiring ‖ ‖ to be sufficiently small under the appropriate matrix norm. For more general problems, which cannot be rewritten in such a way that the two matrices commute, the ordering of matrix products produced by repeated application of the Leibniz rule must be tracked.
A formal power series can be loosely thought of as an object that is like a polynomial, but with infinitely many terms.Alternatively, for those familiar with power series (or Taylor series), one may think of a formal power series as a power series in which we ignore questions of convergence by not assuming that the variable X denotes any numerical value (not even an unknown value).
The above power series expansion can be readily evaluated if there is a systematic approach to calculate the derivates to any order. Using the chain rule, the derivatives can be broken down to the single derivative on either the energy or the state. The Hellmann–Feynman theorems are used to calculate these single derivatives.
Unlike an ordinary series, the formal power series is not required to converge: in fact, the generating function is not actually regarded as a function, and the "variable" remains an indeterminate. One can generalize to formal power series in more than one indeterminate, to encode information about infinite multi-dimensional arrays of numbers.
Each type of convergence corresponds to a different metric for the space of functions that are added together in the series, and thus a different type of limit. The Weierstrass M-test is a useful result in studying convergence of function series.