Trying to define a way to generate the terms of a sequence, and starting with the number 5, I found, surprisingly, that the way I used generated this sequence:

5, 8, 11, 5, 8, 11, 5, 8, 11, ...

And these 3 numbers repeat in this order indefinitely.

Define a simple way to generate this sequence.

given a infinite sequence of real numbers that repeats every n values and those values are x1,x2,....,xn you can use the following process to easily generate a closed function to gives those values.

First find polynomial P(t) such that P(k)=xk for k=1 to n.

then let

F(t)=P(1+[(t-1) mod n])

and F(t) will generate the needed sequence.

Posted by Daniel on 2009-03-07 22:59:00