emayer

10 Reputation

One Badge

6 years, 93 days

MaplePrimes Activity


These are questions asked by emayer

In Maple 2018, I was playing around with some sums of infinite series, and I came across a result that made me wonder if Maple was perhaps using some other definition or understanding of the sum of a series in its calculation. Take a look at the screenshot linked below:

https://ibb.co/hMdkQHn

That first series is most certainly divergent since the limit as n approaches infinity of n^2/(n+1) is not equal to 0. And just to confirm my own sanity, I even checked some of the partial sums of the series, which sure enough are diverging. And yet for the infinite sum, Maple is giving this finite result.

I even checked a more familiar alternating series, the alternating harmonic series, which Maple does correctly calculate to be ln(2).

What am I missing here? Is Maple using a different definition for the sum of the series than the limit of the partial sums as n approaches infinity? Or is there a mistake with how I've written something that I'm not noticing?

Page 1 of 1