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The early history of the factorial function. (English) Zbl 0766.01009

The author looks at the early history of the factorial function and analyses the work of De Moivre, Stirling, D. Bernoulli, Euler, Legendre and finally Gauss to this topic. Various formulas and approximations of the factorial function are described in detail.

MSC:

01A50 History of mathematics in the 18th century
01A55 History of mathematics in the 19th century
Full Text: DOI

References:

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