For on , initially at rest with zero displacement, apply for and keep . A geometric series in the Laplace transform gives
Here is the Heaviside step function, , and only finitely many terms contribute at any finite time. The second step in each pair is a sign-reversed reflection from the fixed endpoint. The formula solves the wave equation classically away from the fronts and distributionally across them; the midpoint is a square wave of period .
Root-of-unity filter Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-29
For ,
This is the finite geometric series identity and expresses orthogonality of the characters of .
The stationary law of a two-resource linear flow network is normalizable exactly when
These are the strict offered-load constraints on the two unit-capacity resources. Summing first over the through-route count reduces normalization to two geometric series, which diverge at equality. With positive arrival rates, the nonexplosive continuous-time Markov chain is then positive recurrent.
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.
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.