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3 replies

19-Tanzanite
May 13, 2013

Your expression makes no sense. n is defined in the summation as ranging from 1 to infinity, so what do you expect the limit to do?

Is this what you actually wanted to do?

25-Diamond I
May 13, 2013

Richard Jackson wrote:

Your expression makes no sense. n is defined in the summation as ranging from 1 to infinity, so what do you expect the limit to do?

Maybe Rasmus had something like this in mind

series.png

19-Tanzanite
May 13, 2013

Yes, that would make sense

25-Diamond I
May 13, 2013

The limes you wrote in front does not make sense, as the result of the series would not include any variable n!

The series itself (without the lim) diverges, but Mathcads symbolics is not powerful enough to come to that conclusion - it would require comparisons with well know similar diverging series, which Mathcad obviously has not built in.

The limes (without the series) converges against 0, but of course you won't need Mathcad to see that.

1-Visitor
May 16, 2013

So there is no way Mathcad can tell my whether the series diverges or converges?

19-Tanzanite
May 16, 2013

Not directly, no. You can use it to apply standard tests though. See for example

http://math2.org/math/expansion/tests.htm

and

http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ralph/Classes/242/SeriesConvTests.pdf

12-Amethyst
May 20, 2013

Whether matchad can show it or not, the series diverges. The nth term is always greater than (1/2)*n^(-1/2), which diverges. The latter term n^(-p), without the factor 1/2, is the general term of a series for the Riemann zeta function, which diverges for p <=1, and converges for p>1.

Mathcad symbolics usually need a helping hand, as has been pointed out many times. In mcd11, the symbolics got two different answers for the referecne series - one correct, one not - with a seemingly innocuous change.

Lou

25-Diamond I
May 20, 2013

Its a shame that newer Mathcad versions with Mupad as symbolic engine have still more problems with that rather simple limes. Only the float-mode (how should we call that mode which is automatically taken if MC symbolics encounters even a single decimal point - "semi-exact"?) it returns the right answer.

diverge1.png

That "float-trick" however does not work for the original limit:

diverge2.png