Use of exclamation point

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I'm quite puzzled by the use of an exclamation point in this paper. The authors introduce the following linear constraints to a quadratic program:

$ \sum_k a^{(l)}_k b_j (\mathbf{x}_k) = r_j^{(l)} $ for $j \in I$,

where $l = 2,3,...,6$, $\mathbf{b}(\mathbf{x})=[1,x,y,x^2,xy,y^2]^T$; $r = [r_1^{(l)}, r_2^{(l)}, ..., r_I^{(l)}]^T = \alpha_l ! \mathbf{e}_l$. Here, $\mathbf{e}_l$ is the $l$-th standard basis for $\mathbb{R}^I$ and $\alpha$'s are further defined (for $I=6$) as $\alpha_1 = (0, 0)$, $\alpha_2 = (1, 0)$, $\alpha_3 = (0, 1)$, $\alpha_4 = (2, 0)$, $\alpha_5 = (1, 1)$, $\alpha_6 = (0, 2)$.

What is the meaning of this exclamation mark in $\alpha_l ! \mathbf{e}_l$? It looks neither like a factorial, nor a derangement, since the result should be in $\mathbb{R}^I$. I suspect that it has to do with the power of a bivariate polynomial they use: $f(x,y) = [1, x, y, x^2, xy, y^2]^T\mathbf{a}$, but can't get my head around it still.

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I'll just type in the answer of egreg (thanks!) to get it over with. This fits the context very well.


In the paper $\alpha_i$ is a multi-index, $\alpha_i = (a_1,a_2,\dots,a_d)$, with $a_{j} \in \mathbb{N}$ and $\alpha_i!=a_1! \cdot a_2! \cdot \ldots \cdot a_d!$. This seems clear looking at equations A.6 and A.7.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-index_notation