ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to develop the tools for summing and multiplying a large number of elements of a sequence. It discusses new sequences from old ones. Whenever the elements of a sequence can be represented explicitly by a Maple expression, then any finite sum or product of these elements can be performed using the standard library functions addition and multiplication. Maple provides the standard library functions sum and product which are designed to perform symbolic summations and products, rather than to explicitly addition or multiply quantities. The function sum will attempt to 'discover' a formula for indefinite summation every time it is called with a non-numerical range. If the range is numerical, sum and product will give the same result as addition and multiplication, respectively, except a lot more slowly. The functions sum and product have the inert form Sum and Product, respectively, which leaves the operation indicated.