For a natural number n, the factorial of n, written n!, is the product of all natural numbers from 1 up to n: n!=1×2×3×⋯×(n−1)×n. It can equally be read in the reverse (and often more useful) order, n!=n×(n−1)×(n−2)×⋯×2×1, which is what makes properties like n!=n×(n−1)! so natural: the factorial of a number is that number times the factorial of the number just below it. By convention, 0! is defined to equal 1 (even though 0 is not itself a natural number), which keeps formulas like nC0=1 and nP0=1 consistent without needing a special-case exception. Factorial notation grows extremely fast (10! is already over 3.6 million), so most factorial computations in practice are done by CANCELLING a shared tail between a numerator and a denominator (writing the larger factorial as extra factors times the smaller one) rather than by expanding both fully — this is the technique behind simplifying expressions like (n−r)!n! …