Termwise differentiation of a power series Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-25
Inside its radius of convergence, a power series can be differentiated term by term:
The differentiated series has the same radius of convergence. The conclusion concerns the interior, including uniform convergence on smaller closed disks; it does not assert that differentiated boundary series converge wherever the original did. For example, converges conditionally at , but its differentiated series does not.
Applied to the geometric series, it gives the useful identity
Differentiation turns the plain coefficients into integer weights. This is one way generating functions translate a weighted counting question into an operation on a known series. A proof controls the original and differentiated tails on smaller disks; the Weierstrass M-test provides the needed uniform bounds. See Lebl, Basic Analysis, §11.3: power-series differentiation and analyticity.
Termwise integration Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Thermal partition function of a quantum harmonic oscillator Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
For a quantum harmonic oscillator with , and inverse temperature , the canonical partition function is . The geometric series gives the displayed formula. Keeping the zero-point energy is essential to its prefactor.
Truncated tensor algebra 2026-10-14
The truncated tensor algebra discards products of degree greater than . Its multiplication is . Every element with scalar part is invertible by a finite geometric series in its positive-degree part. Truncated exponential and logarithm are finite polynomials.
Two-turn renewal game 2026-10-20
Suppose each independent turn makes the current player win with probability , lose with probability , or pass with probability , with and . The players have identical turn rules and alternate after a pass. Before the first pair of turns finishes, the starting player wins with probability . Passing twice returns to the initial state with probability . First-step analysis therefore gives , proving the formula. The geometric series of repeated restarts converges because ; infinite play has probability zero. For , nobody ever wins, so that excluded case has no eventual winning probability summing to one.
An unbounded function can multiply a series while preserving uniform convergence. On , let . The geometric series gives
The equality follows because increases up to . Both the first term and the sum are unbounded, while their difference after sufficiently many terms is uniformly small. Uniform convergence controls approximation errors; boundedness of each individual function is a separate property.
For an irrational skew shift, the averages of every continuous function converge uniformly in the starting point to , with normalized Lebesgue measure. Nonconstant Fourier basis characters have either linear or quadratic phases. Linear phases are bounded geometric series; for quadratic phases the Van der Corput inequality for finite scalar sequences reduces to linear correlations of irrational frequency, uniformly in the starting point. Approximation by trigonometric polynomials proves the assertion and identifies every invariant Borel probability measure as .
For , the Landweber full inverse filter obeys
Indeed, with , the telescoping geometric series and give . Thus noise of norm at most produces iterate error at most . If , replace 2 by 1 to obtain . Together with exact-data strong convergence, a stopping choice and proves convergent regularization of an inverse problem.
A noncommutative formal power series over a field is a unit exactly when its constant term is nonzero. Necessity follows because the constant term is a ring homomorphism to the coefficient field. For sufficiency, write with and of zero constant term. The formal geometric series is well-defined because only can contribute to a word of length . Its left and right products with are , by the finite geometric-series identity in each fixed degree. Multiplying by gives the inverse of .
On a cyclic sequence of independent Bernoulli random variables with success probability , count all runs of consecutive successes, allowing overlaps and taking . The count has expected value . Its variance is the displayed expression: each starting indicator has variance ; two starts at cyclic distance have joint probability ; nonoverlapping starts are independent. There are ordered overlapping pairs at each such distance, because the two ranges do not meet when .
For , summing a geometric series gives . Markov's inequality therefore proves absence with high probability when , and Chebyshev's inequality proves existence and relative concentration when . This remains valid for varying probabilities eventually at most one half.