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The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, concerning an infinite sum of inverse squares.It was first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734, [1] and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. [2]
As a series of real numbers it diverges to infinity, so the sum of this series is infinity. However, it can be manipulated to yield a number of mathematically interesting results. For example, many summation methods are used in mathematics to assign numerical values even to a divergent series.
A summation method that is linear and stable cannot sum the series 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ to any finite value. (Stable means that adding a term at the beginning of the series increases the sum by the value of the added term.) This can be seen as follows. If + + + =, then adding 0 to both sides gives
This list of mathematical series contains formulae for finite and infinite sums. It can be used in conjunction with other tools for evaluating sums. Here, is taken to have the value
Ramanujan summation is a technique invented by the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan for assigning a value to divergent infinite series.Although the Ramanujan summation of a divergent series is not a sum in the traditional sense, it has properties that make it mathematically useful in the study of divergent infinite series, for which conventional summation is undefined.
(up to infinity) is also divergent, but some methods may be used to sum it to 1 / 4 . This is the square of the value most summation methods assign to Grandi's series, which is reasonable as it can be viewed as the Cauchy product of two copies of Grandi's series.
Greek mathematician Archimedes produced the first known summation of an infinite series with a method that is still used in the area of calculus today. He used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, [5] and gave a remarkably accurate approximation of π. [80] [81]
In mathematical analysis, Cesàro summation (also known as the Cesàro mean [1] [2] or Cesàro limit [3]) assigns values to some infinite sums that are not necessarily convergent in the usual sense. The Cesàro sum is defined as the limit, as n tends to infinity, of the sequence of arithmetic means of the first n partial sums of the series.