: the product of all the positive integers from 1 to n—symbol n!
2
: the quantity 0! arbitrarily defined as equal to 1
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the Web
Adjective
The benefits of having a small and independent unit focusing on a challenge is multi-factorial. Nelson Dumas, Forbes, 24 June 2022 The coefficients of all those polynomials were only made up of odd factorial denominators with their alternating signs.Quanta Magazine, 1 June 2022 The total number of possibilities is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 or 120, the factorial 5!. Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 21 Apr. 2022
Noun
Factorials grow so fast that a library of 240 songs will result in sequences totaling the figure 240!—a factorial that is a mind-boggling 469 digits long. Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 21 Apr. 2022 The exclamation point there isn’t the end of a sentence but, instead, denotes a factorial, the value obtained by multiplying the number by every number that precedes it. Philip Bump, Washington Post, 20 Dec. 2019 But for graphs with n nodes, the number of different matchings is n factorial (1 * 2 * 3 * … * n), which is so much larger than n that this brute-force approach is hopelessly impractical for all but the smallest graphs.Quanta Magazine, 14 Dec. 2015 Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!).Quanta Magazine, 10 Dec. 2014 See More