Something Cute I Never Noticed Before About Infinite Sums

This is a trifle, for which I apologize. I’ve been sick. But I ran across this while reading Carl B Boyer’s The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development. This is from the chapter “A Century Of Anticipation”, developments leading up to Newton and Leibniz and The Calculus As We Know It. In particular, while working out the indefinite integrals for simple powers — x raised to a whole number — John Wallis, whom you’ll remember from such things as the first use of the ∞ symbol and beating up Thomas Hobbes for his lunch money, noted this:

Which is fine enough. But then Wallis also noted that

And furthermore that

And isn’t that neat? Wallis goes on to conclude that this is true not just for finitely many terms in the numerator and denominator, but also if you carry on infinitely far. This seems like a dangerous leap to make, but they treated infinities and infinitesimals dangerously in those days.

What makes this work is — well, it’s just true; explaining how that can be is kind of like explaining how it is circles have a center point. All right. But we can prove that this has to be true at least for finite terms. A sum like 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 is an arithmetic progression. It’s the sum of a finite number of terms, each of them an equal difference from the one before or the one after (or both).

Its sum will be equal to the number of terms times the arithmetic mean of the first and last. That is, it’ll be the number of terms times the sum of the first and the last terms and divided that by two. So that takes care of the numerator. If we have the sum 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + up to whatever number you like which we’ll call ‘N’, we know its value has to be (N + 1) times N divided by 2. That takes care of the numerator.

The denominator, well, that’s (N + 1) cases of the number N being added together. Its value has to be (N + 1) times N. So the fraction is (N + 1) times N divided by 2, itself divided by (N + 1) times N. That’s got to be one-half except when N is zero. And if N were zero, well, that fraction would be 0 over 0 and we know what kind of trouble that is.

It’s a tiny bit, although you can use it to make an argument about what to expect from , as Wallis did. And it delighted me to see and to understand why it should be so.