I just found out that the sum of 1+2+3+...  is  -1/12.     !?!   Crazy. 
Not really.  Google on divergent series or Euler summation.  The result 
explains why bosonic string theory must operate only in 26 dimensions!  It 
would then appear that  ... -3 - 2 - 1 + 0 +1 +2 +3 + ... is zero. 





peter dalgaard <pdalgd@gmail.com> 
Sent by: r-help-bounces@r-project.org
02/15/2011 11:53 AM

To
David Winsemius <dwinsemius@comcast.net>
cc
r-help@r-project.org, Kjetil Halvorsen 
<kjetilbrinchmannhalvorsen@gmail.com>, Maithula Chandrashekhar 
<m.chandrashekhar1977@gmail.com>
Subject
Re: [R] A Math question







On Feb 15, 2011, at 15:17 , David Winsemius wrote:

> 
> On Feb 14, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
> 
>> or even better:
>> 
>> http://mathoverflow.net/
> 
> I beg to differ. That is designated in its FAQ as expecting "research 
level questions", while the forum I offered is labeled as "Welcome to Q&A 
for people studying math at any level and professionals in related 
fields". I don't think the proffered question could be considered 
"research level".

Yep. 

As for the stats contents, we do actually touch upon the question in basic 
probability. This is the reason that sums over infinite index sets are 
only defined if the corresponding sum of the absolute value is finite: 
Otherwise the result depends on the order of summation. (Think 
0+1+2+(-1)+3+4+(-2)+5+6+(-3)+....)

> 
>> 
>> On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 8:02 PM, David Winsemius 
<dwinsemius@comcast.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Feb 13, 2011, at 4:47 PM, Maithula Chandrashekhar wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Dear all, I admit this is not anything to do R and even with
>>>> Statistics perhaps. Strictly speaking this is a math related 
question.
>>>> However I have some reasonable feeling that experts here would come 
up
>>>> with some elegant suggestion to my question.
>>>> 
>>>> Here my question is: What is sum of all Integers? I somewhere heard
>>>> that it is Zero as positive and negative integers will just cancel
>>>> each other out. However want to know is it correct?
>>> 
>>> There are more appropriate places to pose such questions:
>>> http://math.stackexchange.com/
>>> 
> 
> David Winsemius, MD
> West Hartford, CT
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes@cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd@gmail.com

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