Incorporating Generating Functions to Computational Science Education

Computational Science is so important such that more and more institutions start to offer courses or even programs in this area recently. What should be incorporated into computational science curriculum? Generating Functions (GFs) are one of the most useful tools, GFs have been playing an important role in many applications, including analysis of algorithms and in combinatorics, etc, GFs transform discrete data into continuous functions, so we can apply all the mathematical theories and methodologies for manipulating functions to study discrete data or data science. Recently, it was showed that GFs can be used beyond traditional applications in computation [1, 4, 5, 12]. So we believe it is very important to incorporate GFs into computational science education, including both traditional and new applications.