Small Intervals where the Partial Sums of a Series Fail to Alternate

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Consider the variant of the series
, where
is a non-negative parameter. For
, the partial sums
of
alternate as
gets large. However, for values of
in a certain range, there will be a small interval where the sequence of partial sums fails to alternate. That is, there is an
such that
or the reverse,
. It might be an interesting exercise to understand this visually paradoxical phenomenon (see Details for an outline).
Contributed by: Marvin Ray Burns (March 2011)
With additional contributions by the Wolfram Demonstrations team.
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
For , there are no skips in the alternations of the partial sums. In order to have such a skip, there must be a sign change between
and
. This is equivalent to having exactly one root of
in
. It can be shown that this happens for
. For
we still have two real roots to this equation, but both are in the interval
. Hence there is no sign change (because there were two skips within the same unit interval). For
, there are no longer real solutions to the equation
. Also notice that for
, we have a root for
and another with
. Hence we have consecutive sign changes. For
in this range, we have an initial sequence of three partial sums decreasing after the first term.
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