ABSTRACT
Before we dive into the wider variety of approaches for proving binomial identities that will occupy most of this book we should spend a chapter establishing a few basic properties and techniques. First, we consider the generalization of the binomial coefficients to noninteger and negative values. This is an important generalization—one we will use frequently throughout the rest of the text. As is often the case, generalization will sometimes produce simpler proofs. In addition, some identities just make more sense in a general setting.
