Foxmaths! 2.0

January 23, 2009

Euler-Mascheroni: A Curious Identity

Filed under: Maths — Fox @ 1:26 am

There’s this curious mathematical constant, known as the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. In brief, consider the sum of the first n reciprocals, 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + … + 1/n. As n goes to infinity, this approaches ln(n). They get very close, with just a slight offset. And that offset converges as n increases. Thus we have,

\gamma = lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} ( \sum_{k = 1}^n \frac{1}{k} - ln(n) )

Numerically, it has the value

\gamma = 0.577215664901532860606512090082...

So, I was playing around earlier on Mathematica, as is my wont, and discovered the following curious identity, which I present without proof.

\int_0^1 Sin(\frac{1}{x}) dx + \sum_{n = 1}^\infty \frac{ (-1)^n }{ (2n+1)!(2n) } = 1 - \gamma

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