 Cesàro mean

The Cesàro mean of the first $n\ge 1$ terms of a sequence is their arithmetic mean. It is a cumulative average: increasing $n$ includes the whole initial segment, rather than a fixed-length sliding window. For $a_k=(-1{)}^k$, the even-length averages are zero and the odd-length averages are $-1/n$, so they tend to zero even though the sequence does not converge.

For a periodic sequence with period $p\ge 1$ and one-cycle arithmetic mean $M$, split an initial segment into full cycles and a remainder of fewer than $p$ terms. The full cycles contribute exactly $M$ per term; the remainder contributes a fixed bounded error divided by $n$. Thus the Cesàro means tend to $M$. The cycle $0,2,1$ in the bounded partial sums need not be Cesàro summable illustration has arithmetic mean one. Treating it as a sequence of partial sums gives a series with first-order Cesàro sum one; averaging a sequence and summing its terms remain different operations.