Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 8 2 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
Use the uniform bound for harmonic sine polynomialsFor completeness, reduce to and split at . The first part is bounded by . Geometric-series summation bounds every interval sum of by . Summation by parts bounds the remaining harmonic-weighted tail by . Negative follows by oddness and is immediate.
Let . Choose so large that , and positive integers such that the intervals are strictly separated and increase. DefineThe bound makes this a continuous function with .
Each Fourier coefficient of has modulus , so the sum of the absolute coefficients is . Therefore every prefix of a normalized block has norm at most one. At any Fourier cutoff, all earlier blocks are complete, at most one block is partial and all later blocks are absent. HenceAt zero, a completed block contributes zero, but its prefix through frequency consists of the negative-frequency sine coefficients and equals . ThusBoth index sequences tend to infinity. The uniformly bounded partial sums fail to converge at the origin, even though the function is continuous and zero there.