Notation for product distributed over sum

notationproductssummation

Given the expression $\prod_{i=1}^n\sum_{j=1}^m a_{ij}$, we can expand it to sum of products in the usual way, namely the sum of all possible sequences of elements in which we choose exactly one representative for each $j$. How to denote that as a mathematical expression?

Best Answer

A variation: We denote with $[m]=\{1,2,\ldots,m\}$ and obtain \begin{align*} \color{blue}{\prod_{i=1}^n\sum_{j=1}^m a_{ij}} &=\left(a_{11}+\cdots+a_{1m}\right)\left(a_{21}+\cdots+a_{2m}\right)\\ &\qquad\cdots\left(a_{n1}+\cdots+a_{nm}\right)\\ &=\sum_{\left(j_1,\ldots,j_n\right)\in[m]^n }a_{1j_1}a_{2j_2}\cdots a_{nj_n}\tag{1}\\ &\,\,\color{blue}{=\sum_{\left(j_1,\ldots,j_n\right)\in[m]^n }\prod_{i=1}^na_{ij_i}}\\ \end{align*}

In (1) we observe that multiplication of the $n$ terms each having $m$ summands is the same as summing up all $n$-tuples $\left(j_1,\ldots,j_n\right)$ from the $n$-fold cartesion product $[m]^n$ and multiply out the elements of each $n$-tuple.

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