Quiz next week! likely on Tuesday 5:30. Uniform continuity, connectedness.
Test following week on Ch 5, 6.


Series: Look ahead

Consider a series of functions . "" means for each , , i.e, point-wise convergence. In other words,

Note that might depend on in this definition. If we can get which is independent of , i.e, determined only by , we say that the sequence uniformly converges.


Preliminaries

Definition 1.

Let be a sequence. An infinite series is an expression of the form

We define the corresponding sequence of partial sums by

and say that the series converges to if the sequence converges to . In this case, we write .

Note that only with for any finite matter for determining whether a series converges. In other words, we can drop a finite number of terms in the beginning of the series.

The Cauchy criterion can be restated for series:

Theorem 2.

converges , such that , we have

The triangle inequality gives us

Also, if we take in the above theorem, we get the following corollary.

Theorem 3(Corollary).

converges .

The converse is not true! diverges.

Rudin, 3.24

Theorem 4.

Suppose for all . Then, converges is bounded.

Note that only the backward implication has any value; the forward implication is true for all convergent series, since convergent sequences are bounded. The former is true because is monotone.


Convergence tests

Comparison test

Rudin, 3.25

Theorem 5.

Suppose for some .
a) converges converges.
b) diverges diverges.

Proof
Given , we know that such that we have

The same works for .

(b) is just the contrapositive of (a). ❏

Rudin, 3.27

Rudin, 3.27

Theorem 6.

Suppose . Then the series converges if and only if the series

converges.

Proof of


For ,

Since converges, we know it is bounded, i.e, for all . We have shown that for every , there exists a such that . Thus, is bounded, and hence it must converge. ❏

Proof of
Let . For ,

So, for all , there exists an such that for some . ❏


Standard series

To use the comparison test efficiently, we need to have plenty of series of nonnegative terms whose convergence or divergence is known.

The geometric series

Rudin, 3.26

Theorem 7.

If , then

If , the series diverges.

Proof
If ,

The result follows if we let .

The p-series

Rudin, 3.28

Theorem 8.

converges if and diverges if .

Proof
If , then the series diverges because . If , we can use 3.27.

This is a geometric series. If , , and diverges, implying diverges. Similarly, if , , and converges, implying converges. ❏


The number e

Rudin, 3,30

Definition 9.

Since

converges.

Rudin, 3.31

Theorem 10.

Proof
Let

We have to show that exists, and that it is equal to . Recall that a limit exists only when . We know that for any sequence, . The goal is to show

Part 1: Showing

So, for all . It follows that . Since , . So we get .

Part 2: Showing
Fix . For ,

Note that is a convergent sequence.

This is true for every . Thus, we have .

Rudin, 3.32

Theorem 11.

is irrational.

Proof
If has the same definition as in the previous proof,

Now, let . Then,

Note that and are integers. But there does not exist an integer between 0 and 1. ❏