As we discussed in the previous post, the Bernoulli brothers Johann and Jakob were both intrigued by the divergence of the harmonic series. Jakob in particular was fascinated by infinite series in general, and he turned his attention to a problem which had been posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1644.
Find the exact sum (and not just an estimate) of the series
In 1655, John Wallis, an English mathematician, had communicated that he had found the sum to three decimal places but he was unable to say anything more concrete. Jakob Bernoulli wrote about this problem in 1689 and it came to be known as the Basel problem, after the hometown of the Bernoullis as well as that of the eventual solver of the problem, Leonhard Euler. There’s a lot of literature available on this problem and some of what we say below is from William Dunham’s award-winning book titled Euler: The master of us all and the paper by Raymond Ayoub titled Euler and the zeta function.
It was known that the series converges but finding the exact sum proved to be remarkably difficult. Many prominent mathematicians, including Leibnitz, Mengoli and the Bernoullis brothers had tried their hand at solving it but had failed. Indeed, after growing increasingly frustrated with his failure, Jakob said the following about this problem [Dunham]:
“If anyone finds and communicates to us that which thusfar has eluded our efforts, great will be our gratitude”
In 1721, a young Euler began studying mathematics under the mentorship of Jakob’s younger brother Johann Bernoulli (who was one of the most prominent mathematicians of the world at that time). In all probability, it was Johann who first told Euler about the Basel problem but it is unclear exactly when he did so. Nonetheless, by 1728 Euler had started working on the problem. It was around the same time when Daniel Bernoulli (Johann’s son) wrote to Christian Goldbach that he had found an approximate value of the sum of the series (the value he gave was ). Goldbach replied that he had found that the sum is between and . One of Euler’s earliest attempts was to find numerical approximations of some of the partial sums of the series but these were not too helpful. Indeed, the sum of the first thousand terms is but this is only accurate up to the first two digits (the problem being that the series converges very slowly).
We now discuss Euler’s solution to the Basel problem.
Theorem (Euler, 1734) .
This is truly a remarkable result and anyone who sees it for the first time cannot help but be amazed. Euler’s proof is a shining example of his ingenuity and mathematical prowess. In order to prove the result he used the well-known series expansion for :
Next, he considered the “infinite polynomial”
and observed that for . Now, the roots of the polynomial are given by all such that (and . This gives us and this means that for each , there are two roots. Using this observation, Euler factored as follows:
The next step illustrates Euler’s foresight and his genius, for he expanded the right-hand side as follows
where the remaining terms in the expansion on the right are not relevant to the problem at hand. Euler then compared the coefficients of in the above equation to get
which gave him the celebrated solution to the Basel problem. This was a triumphant moment for Euler and it truly established his reputation as the foremost mathematician at that time. While the general reaction on the result was that of amazement, a few remained skeptical. In his proof Euler had performed manipulations on infinite series considering them as polynomials and Daniel Bernoulli objected to this approach. Euler himself was less convinced about the rigor of the method so he devised other proofs justifying the formula. He also looked at the $p$-series for .
These ideas were used by Bernhard Riemann in the 19th century in studying the Riemann-zeta function
in connection with his investigation of the distribution of primes. In this notation, the solution of the Basel problem reads as . Remarkably enough, in 1740 Euler gave a more general formula for calculating if is an integer:
where are the Bernoulli numbers.
Since then a number of modern proofs have popped up. A nice summary of some of the available proofs is given by Robin Chapman in his article titled Evaluating . Interestingly, while we know the sum of the -series when is positive and even, not a lot is known about the sum of the series when is odd. As far as I know, there is no exact formula for .
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 16, 2013 at 10:18 PM
Peter L. Griffiths
To solve the Basel problem instead of using sine formulae, Euler could have used cosine formulae giving a result of [(PI)^2]/8 instead of [(PI^2]/6.
March 27, 2013 at 9:05 PM
Peter L. Griffiths
An important technique which Euler used to solve the Basel Problem was the Newtonian Formulae for converting an infinite product series into an infinite summation series and vice versa, as described on pages 358-359 of vol 5 of D.T. Whiteside’s Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton.
July 2, 2013 at 8:32 PM
ptp
In 1979, Roger Apéry showed the irrationality of zeta(3).
May 19, 2015 at 7:58 PM
Peter L. Griffiths
For a more convincing demonstration you need to apply the Newtonian formulae for converting a summation series into a product series and vice versa. The Basel problem probably also
includes (PI)^2 /8 as well as (PI)^2 /6.
December 23, 2015 at 9:16 PM
Peter L. Griffiths
For a convincing solution of the Basel Problem, it may be best to start from
the e or antilog version, before moving to the cosine or sine version, where it should be recognised that arcsine 0 is PI, and arccos 0 is (PI)/2, so that any angle can be represented as uPI or u(PI)/2 . According to the Newtonian formulae the second term of the infinite series
reflects all the other terms. To arrive at the product series, terms of the eventual summation need to be either deducted from or added to 1, depending on whether the calculation is trigonometric or antilog.
June 15, 2016 at 7:06 PM
Peter L. Griffiths
The Newtonian infinite series converting an infinite summation series into an infinite product series is 1 +Ax + Bx^2 + Cx^3 ….=(1+ax)(1+bx)(1+cx)..
The alternating version of this is 1-Ax + Bx^2 – Cx^3 ….=(1-ax)(1-bx)(1-cx)…
The A summation version of this is Ax = ax + bx+cx……This A summation
is effectively a special case of the original Basel conjecture
(PI)^2/6 = 1 + 1/2^2 + 1/3^2 + 1/4^2….. with both sides multiplied by
(u/PI)^2, thus becoming (u^2)/6 = (u/PI)^2 +(u/2PI)^2 + (u/3PI)^2 …..
The A summation therefore becomes Au^2 = au^2 + bu^2 + cu^2 …
with A=1/6, a = (1/PI)^2, b = (1/2PI)^2, c = (1/3PI)^2… These can be applied to the alternating version mentioned above which becomes the accepted (sinu)/u series. These can then be applied to the product to reveal the new sine series. Exactly the same procedure can be applied to the cosines. I am not sure whether all this constitutes a proof in the Euclidean sense. Something in the behaviour of infinite series may have to be investigated further.