Beautiful proofs (#1) : Divergence of the harmonic series

The harmonic series are as follows:

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And it has been known since as early as 1350 that this series diverges. Oresme’s proof to it is just so beautiful.

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image

Now replace ever term in the bracket with the lowest term that is present in it. This will give a lower bound on S1.

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image

Clearly the lower bound of S1 diverges and therefore S1 also diverges.
But it interesting to note that of divergence is incredibly small: 10 billion terms in the series only adds up to around 23.6 !

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