Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 ia Paper 1 9C iv Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Let , with . The indices in the th dyadic block have one sign, soA convergent sequence of partial sums must be a Cauchy sequence: for every , all sufficiently late pairs of partial sums differ by less than . The displayed differences violate this necessary condition with , at arbitrarily late endpoints. Thus the series diverges, even though its individual terms tend to zero. This dyadic-block alternation of reciprocal terms has growing block lengths; the fixed-length block argument of the previous part does not apply.