Sunday, December 5, 2010

FindSequenceFunction

I stumbled onto this on accident since it's not advertised much. You can extract the pattern in the sequence using
FindSequenceFunction[{20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40}]

New in version 7. This functionality is one of the reasons I used Maple several years ago.
A related function is "RootApproximant" which tries to find an algebraic number approximating a given real.

Here's a tricky one -- number of regions in 4-space formed by n-1 hyperplanes. It starts with

1,2,4,8,16


Mathematica incorrectly guesses 2^n



Next term of the sequence is 31, if you include that term, it gives the correct formula

Posted by Yaroslav Bulatov at 9:53 AM

1 comment:

  1. UnknownDecember 7, 2010 at 6:56 AM

    Given the first 5 terms I would say that Mathematica is correct when it returned 2^n since that's the simplest formula that fits the given data.

    It's a very nice function - If only I had it when I was in high school :)

    ReplyDelete

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