I always found derivation to be helpful in remembering. Since this question is tagged as at the middle school level, I assume you've only learned about arithmetic and geometric sequences.
First, remember what these names mean. An arithmetic sequence is a sequence in which consecutive terms are increased by a fixed amount; in other words, it is an additive sequence. If
is the
th term in the sequence, then the next term
is a fixed constant (the common difference
) added to the previous term. As a recursive formula, that's
This is the part that's probably easier for you to remember. The explicit formula is easily derived from this definition. Since
, this means that
, so you plug this into the recursive formula and end up with
You can continue in this pattern, since every term in the sequence follows this rule:
and so on. You start to notice a pattern: the subscript of the earlier term in the sequence (on the right side) and the coefficient of the common difference always add up to
. You have, for example,
in the third equation above.
Continuing this pattern, you can write the formula in terms of a known number in the sequence, typically the first one
. In order for the pattern mentioned above to hold, you would end up with
or, shifting the index by one so that the formula gives the
th term explicitly,
Now, geometric sequences behave similarly, but instead of changing additively, the terms of the sequence are scaled or changed multiplicatively. In other words, there is some fixed common ratio
between terms that scales the next term in the sequence relative to the previous one. As a recursive formula,
Well, since
is just the term after
scaled by
, you can write
Doing this again and again, you'll see a similar pattern emerge:
and so on. Notice that the subscript and the exponent of the common ratio both add up to
. For instance, in the third equation,
. Extrapolating from this, you can write the explicit rule in terms of the first number in the sequence:
or, to give the formula for
explicitly,
