TI-84 Plus CE field manual for IB Math
Working with sequences
Enter a sequence, open its table, and scroll until the first row where the sequence value is greater than a chosen threshold.
Find the first value of n for which the sequence un=10(1.2)n exceeds 1000.
Press . From the default cursor position, press three times to reach the FUNCTION PARAMETRIC POLAR SEQ row, then three times to reach SEQ, and press .
Press . Press to move to the nMin= line, then type to set nMin=1.
Press to move to u(n)=, then type 10(1.2)^n with . Leave u(1) blank because this is an explicit sequence, not a recursive one.
Open table setup with and set TblStart=1 (the default is 0) so the table matches nMin. Keep the other defaults shown below. Then press to view the table.
The table starts at n=1. Press to scroll until the values pass 1000: the row for n=25 is still below the target, and the next row is the first one above it. (To jump ahead instead of scrolling, reopen table setup with and raise TblStart to a value near the target.)
The first value is n=26, because u25≈954 but u26≈1140.
Your turn
Work each one on your calculator, then check the answer.
- 1
Find the first n for which un=5(1.3)n exceeds 2000.
- 2
Find the first n for which un=4n(1.1)n exceeds 600.
- 3
Find the first n for which un=8(1.25)n exceeds 300.