Calculating approximate growth from three numbers

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I have a set of three numbers 3600, 5200,12000; how do I calculate an approximate 4th number in the series from these figures?

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One possible way is to look at ratios: about a factor of 1.4 from 3500 to 5200, about 2.3 from 5200 to 120000. If those two factors had both been the same, you could use them to guess the next term. Alas, they're pretty different.

One thing that might help is if we knew something about the source of the numbers. If they're the number of thousands of shares of some stock traded on Mon, Tue, Wed, then Thursday's number could be "1100" quite plausibly. If they're the number of cells in a cell colony in a agar dish, then an exponential model makes more sense.

In short: without more data, no, there's really no way to calculate an approximate fourth number in the sequence.