The early history of the factorial function
@article{Dutka1991TheEH, title={The early history of the factorial function}, author={Jacques Dutka}, journal={Archive for History of Exact Sciences}, year={1991}, volume={43}, pages={225-249} }
was encountered in the evaluation of integrals, in the summation of series, in number theory, eie. Indeed the function is probably the most frequently used of the higher transcendental functions in applications. From about the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, the factorial function was intensively studied by some of the foremost mathematicians of the period, and its basic properties were determined. The purpose of this paper is to give a connected account of these developments…
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