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What is the symbol of factorial?
What is the meaning of 5 factorial?
What is the value of 7!?
You don't calculate $0.5!$ by hand. Decimal factorials do not make sense. The Gamma function might do what you want, but it's not the easiest to do by hand as it's a pretty unfriendly integral, at least in general. You might be able to calculate $\Gamma(1.5)$ (which would corespond to $0.5!$) by hand if you really wanted to: $$ \Gamma(1.5) = \int_0^\infty \sqrt x e^{-x} dx $$ and it turns out to be $\frac12\sqrt\pi$.
You can use Stirling's approximation, but it won't work well for small numbers like $\frac12$. For larger numbers, Stirling's approximation is quite good whether for integers or non-integers. It says: $$n! \approx \sqrt{2\pi n}\Bigl(\frac ne\Bigr)^n.$$
For example, $12.7!\approx 2.8616\times10^9$ and the Stirling formula gives around $2.843\times10^9$.
Of course, how to evaluate Stirling's formula with pencil and paper is an interesting question all by itself.
For smaller numbers of the form $n+\frac12$ your best bet is just to know that $$\frac12! = \frac12\sqrt\pi$$ and then use the rule that $(x+1)! = (x+1)x!$ so for example $\frac32! = \frac32\cdot \frac12! = \frac34\sqrt\pi$.
For numbers that are not half-integers, I have no good suggestions. There may be something involving the reciprocal factorial function (that is, $x\mapsto \frac1{x!}$) that can be calculated with some accuracy. There is a MacLaurin series that will be accurate, but it does not look easy to calculate with pen and paper.
I saw a post on this sub a few days ago (sorry, I tried to find it with no luck) where someone pointed out that: 1*2*3*4*5*6*7*8*9*10 = 1*2*3*4*5*6*7*6*5*4*3*2*1 It makes sense because the first 1 through 7 cancel out, then the prime factorization of 8*9*10 (2β΄ * 3Β²\ * 5) matches that for 1-6.
My question is: are there other examples of this? To formalize, for any two real number m and n, such that m<n, how many examples are there where n! = m! * (m+1)! (The above example of course being m=6 and n=10)
My gut intuition is that it would have to be during a decent length string of composite numbers.