The Basel problem was first posed by Pietro Mengoli, a mathematics professor at the University of Bologna, in 1650, the same year in which he showed that the alternating harmonic series sums to . The Basel problem asks for the sum of the reciprocals of the squares of the natural numbers,
It is not immediately clear that this series converges, but this can be proved without much difficulty, as was first shown by Jakob Bernoulli in 1689. The sum is approximately 1.645 which has no obvious interpretation.
* * * * *
That’s Maths II: A Ton of Wonders
by Peter Lynch has just appeared.
Full details and links to suppliers at
http://logicpress.ie/2020-3/
* * * * *
Continue reading ‘The Basel Problem: Euler’s Bravura Performance’