Beautiful proofs (#3) – Euler’s sum

** Now if all that made sense but you are still uncomfortable with the form of the polynomial chosen, read the first three pages of this article. (It has to do with convergence)

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

The harmonic series are as follows:

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

Now replace ever term in the bracket with the lowest term that is present in it. This will give a lower bound on S_1.

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 !