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or divergence.
What about your intuition?
Maybe you should just get a feel for what
works.
Well, intuition is also flawed.
Let's look at an example.
I claim that the series 1 minus a half
plus
a third minus a fourth, plus a fifth, et
cetera,
something that we'll call the alternating
harmonic series, does converge, and it
converges to a value of log of 2.
Now, why is that the case?
Well, recall that log of 1 plus x is
exactly this kind
of alternating sum of x to the n over n.
If we
evaluate this at x equals 1, then we
obtain this value.
Now, technically speaking, one is not in
the interval
of convergence for this series, but hey,
trust me.
You can trust me.
This actually does converge.
Now, if you believe that, then what
happens when you multiply
everything by 1 half?
Well of course, you just multiply each
term by 1 half.
That is definitely true.
Now, if we spread those terms out a little
bit and
add everything together term wise.
What happens?
Well, we get 1, negative 1 half plus 1
half
is 0.
We pull down the 1 third.
Negative 1 4th minus 1 4th, that's minus 1
half.
Pull down the 1 5th.
The 1 6ths cancel.
Pull down the 1 7th, etcetera.
And I think you can keep going with this.
Some of the terms cancel.
Some of the terms add together.
What is this series.
well, it converges, and it converges
as it must to 3 halves of 2.
That is, log 2 plus 1 half log 2.
This is true.
Trust me.
But at this point, we grow quite concern.
Because if we rearrange the terms,
we get exactly what we started with.
It is a fact,
that by rearranging the terms in the
alternating harmonic series, we obtain a
different answer.
That means your intuition is not so good
all the time.
So, what, what can you trust?
And you can't even trust me, sometimes I
make mistakes.
There's one thing you can trust and that
is LOGIC.
Careful deductive reasoning.
We re going
to use tests for convergence or divergence
that
are based on logic and calculus.
That is what you can trust.
in general, the way that this is going to
to work is as follows.
You'll start with some given sequence, and
you want to determine whether
the series converges or diverges.
You'll have several and about a half dozen
or more tests to choose from.
Not all tests apply to all series.
So you check to see whether a given test
applies.
If it doesn't, choose another.
If it does, then apply that test.
Some tests don't work with a given series,
in which case you try again.
But if the test does work, then you're
done.
You've determined convergence or
divergence.
Unfortunately, you might run out of tests,
in which case, you fail.
But, that won't happen.
We're going to have lots of tests.
Here's the first one.
This is called
the nth term test, and it goes as follows.
It's an if then
statement.
If the hypotheses are satisfied,
then the conclusion follows.
Here's the hypothesis.
If the limit as n goes to infinity of a
sub n is not equal to 0, then
the series diverges.
That's it.
Very, very simple.
Now, in terms of applicability, this is a
four star test.
It applies to any series.
No problem.
It's easy to use.
You just take the limit of the nth term as
n goes to infinity,
and check whether it's zero or not.
But in terms of overall usefulness,
well, this is very limited.
In the sense that it only tells you one