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Convergent and Divergent series (1 Viewer)

Affinity

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will set up a daemon to give a receipt for every email received
 

Xayma

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Originally posted by Grey Council
you won't understand enough of it to freak out. Trust me. lol
But I like seeing half of the greek alphabet.
 

Affinity

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It's understandable if you go through it slowly, isn't that abstract.
 

turtle_2468

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Umm... part of the proof omitted, I will put it in later tonight. Reason being that it's part of an assignment, and the deadline is today, so I don't want to do anything dodgy...
Okay.
Proof of convergent/divergent series...
I'm taking out the bits of Analysis that have been relevant so far. Most of them are also accessible on the website for MATH3610 on http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/ForStudents/courses/math3610/index.shtml, I highly recommend you have at least chapter 1 open when you read this. (eg I really am too lazy to reproduce Cantor's argument, it's really nice tho.. go read that bit if nothing else)

Preliminary defns: |A|<=|B| for infinite sets means that there is a 1-1 (or onto) function from A to B ie one that doesn't have two function values equalling the same thing in B.
Countable: Can put in bijection with N. equivalent to "can put in a list containing every member"
In higher analysis I we proved that N^N (N being natural numbers, and if you take N^2 as pairs of ordered numbers, N^N is all sequences of natural numbers) is countable ie |N^N|=|N| and you can put it in a list as you can N.
(this is the bit I'll put up say a little later. It's an interesting exercise, not that easy though..)

Anyway, back to the question. The set of all series would then be R^N. By Cantor's diagonalisation argument, R is not countable (ie infinity of R is a step higher than infinity of N). It's quite easy to prove that if a subset of set X is not countable then X is not countable either. Therefore as R is uncountable, R^N is not countable either (take the n-tuple (x,0,0,0,0,....) which is basically same as R, and a subset of R^N... skipping a few slight definitonal problems here to save time)

BUT you can show that |R^N|=|R|. So the cardinality of a subset of R^N, ie set of divergent series (call this D) or convergent (call C) is at most that of R. (|D|<=|R|)
But now consider the first element of the series in D. By a function which takes a sequence (x_1, x_2,...) to the number x_1, f then has range all real numbers. Hence we have a one-to-one function f going to R, and so D must have cardinality at least that of R. (|D|>=|R|)
Taking the previous 2 facts, it would be obvious for finite sets that |D|=|R|, but actually you need a hard-to-prove (so I'm told) theorem to conclude that. Nevertheless it's true.
Hence you can find a bijection from D to R.
Similarly |C|=|R|, so there is a bijection from C to R and hence 1 from C to D (just put 2 bijections together).

Notice that divergence/convergence doesn't ultimately matter as we just take the first term :)
 

maniacguy

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"In higher analysis I we proved that N^N is countable ie |N^N|=|N| and you can put it in a list as you can N.

(this is the bit I'll put up say a little later. It's an interesting exercise, not that easy though..)"

Hmm... I claimed it was uncountable since 2^N is a subset of N^N and we know that |2^N|>|N|... of course if you found a bijection that would probably do the trick, though I fail to see that there would be one under the circumstances!

edit:
In fact, it's obviously not countable!
Apply Cantor's diagonalization arguement to the thing!
 
Last edited:

turtle_2468

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*cries*
don't want to think about it... grr, there goes my 100
although, there is still a lot more to come :)
Anyway, I guess marks don't matter for me anyway. But I don't like being wrong... grr

I'll think about that one. But I think my argument still works... you can't apply Cantor's because it's not exactly the same... The sequences don't have to be infinite. ie for the place you choose it could be a finite sequence, and things would stuff up..
ie (5,4) is a member of N^N as I take it..
that's a sequence right?
 

maniacguy

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Yes, it's a sequence, but the 2^N argument still works, even in that case.

And in any event you can apply Cantor's as follows:
Let c_k = 2 if d_kk = 1
Let c_k = 1 if d_kk = anything other than 1, including if d_kk does not exist.

This still generates a sequence of natural numbers, which hence must lie in N^N
 

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