The Integral Test and Error Estimation Using p-Series

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The area of the colored rectangles represents the sum of the series . With the rectangles in the starting (left) position, you can see that
. Slide the rectangles to the right to see that
. Thus the series and the integral converge or diverge together. For a convergent
-series (or any convergent series satisfying the criteria of the integral test), the inequality
holds for all
, where
is the
partial sum. An option in this Demonstration lets you see this fact using
. The gray rectangles represent
, and the colored rectangles represent the "tail",
.
Contributed by: Marc Brodie (Wheeling Jesuit University) (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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