I’ve said in several blog posts that multi-factorials come up often in practice, and given examples. This post will give a glimpse of why this is. Rising powers The kth rising power of a is (a)k = a (a+1) (a + 2) … (a + k – 1). So, for example, (5)3 = 5*6*7 and […] The post Foreshadowing hypergeometric functions first appeared on John D. Cook....