# Suugaku Girl supplementary handout for chapter 1: Sequences

Posted on August 21, 2011 by

That really isn't enough terms to identify as Fibonacci

Suugaku Girl is a manga about people who really like math. The great thing about it is that it contains a substantial amount of math. This is also great because it will give me plenty to blog about.

The first chapter of Suugaku Girl is about the main character’s initial meeting with Milka, our socially retarded genius meganekko. She just starts spouting out numbers and, for whatever reason, he feels compelled to guess what comes next. And that is apparently the beginning of this love story.

In the chapter, we’re introduced to a few sequences, some of which are famous and some of which you might not have considered a sequence. It’ll probably help to understand what a sequence is beyond just being a bunch of numbers in a prescribed order.

Formally, we define a sequence as a function $a:S\to R$. The set $S$ is basically our index and is $\{1,2,…,n\}$ if $a$ is a finite sequence or the set of natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$ if we’re dealing with an infinite sequence. Normally, functions are written as $a(n)$, but, as was alluded to before, we refer to terms by index as in $a_n$.

However, $R$ can be any set. In the case of Suugaku Girl, it seems to be sticking with integers, but we can have sequences of bitstrings, vectors, complex numbers, functions, or whatever. What this also means is that a sequence doesn’t necessarily need to have a “pattern”, but can really be any ordered list of numbers (or functions or vectors or…).

Milka also brings up the idea of infinite sequences. A lot of the time, people will try to “solve” a sequence by completing it when they’re given only the first few terms. But, like Milka suggests, what they’re doing in that case is assuming that the rest of the sequence goes on as initially implied. Really, we can define any sequence we like with any behaviour we like. Again, remember that a sequence can be anything we want it to be. In fact, the sequence that Milka defines using the digits of π is kind of like that in that it’s completely arbitrary and doesn’t really have the kind of sequence definitions we’re used to seeing.

For finite sequences, we can just list all of the terms of our sequence like $(1,1,1,1,1,1000000,1)$. Obviously, we can’t do that for an infinite sequence. Luckily, a lot of the time we define sequences that have some sort of useful pattern that we can represent in a succinct way. Sometimes, like the digits of π sequence, this is harder.

We can try to formally define all of the sequences that were given in the manga. For instance, the Fibonacci sequence $(a_n)_{n=1}^\infty$ is commonly defined as $a_n = a_{n-2} + a_{n-1}$, but we have to give the first two terms $a_1 = 1, a_2 = 1$. The second sequence (which we’ll call $(b_n)_{n=1}^\infty$) takes a bit more work to define. We’ll need to define $p_n$ to be the $n$th prime number and then we can define $b_n = p_n \times p_{n+1}$. The third sequence $(c_n)_{n=1}^\infty$ is easy, it’s just $c_n = n^n$. And we can formalize the last one, which I’ll call $(d_n)_{n=1}^\infty$, just like the first two with a few more words. We let $\pi = q_1q_2q_3\cdots$ be the decimal expansion of π. Then $d_n = 2\cdot q_n$.

So that’s all fine, but what exactly are sequences used for? I’m pretty sure everyone’s learned about arithmetic and geometric sequences in grade school. Obviously, we can study sequences and their behaviour on their own. We can talk about whether they increase or decrease or how fast they grow or whether they converge. Apart from that, I don’t remember seeing sequences used for something besides sequences until analysis.

Analysis is basically the field of pure math that formalizes the concepts that we’re introduced to in calculus and generalizes them to spaces. Limits are a fundamental idea in calculus and analysis and these are defined by how a sequence converges. And this is where those weird sequences of vectors or functions comes into play, since we can talk about the convergence of a sequence of vectors or a sequence of functions in these other spaces that we want to do analysis in.

That’s probably the easiest example of an “application” of sequences. For myself, over the last few months I’ve read about automatic sequences, which are sequences that can be generated by a deterministic finite automaton. This gives us a way to relate automata theory to number theory and algebra. For instance, once we have k-automatic sequences, we can talk about k-regular sequences and come up with power series with respect to certain rings and fields and bla bla bla.

If you ever want to find out what crazy sequence you might have a part of, check out the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

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