Math Awareness Month Part 2: Infinite Series

Today's page for Math Awareness Month is about a recent video that caused some huge debate. I saw the video a month or two ago, and was very intrigued. I showed it to some of my friends, and we were arguing about the content for quite a while. It also spread rapidly around the math department at Andover, with some teachers bringing up in their classes.

Take a look at the page and try some of the exercises. You will find the outcomes very interesting and mind-boggling. The concept of infinity is difficult for any human being to grasp, making it tons of fun to think about.

http://www.mathaware.org/mam/2014/calendar/infinity.html

Comment below what you think of the video. Do you think it is accurate? What do you think the fallacies are? How could this be a part of string theory if it is mathematically flawed?

In math class last week, we were given the following problem:

I then did the math and determined that the limit would be -1/12. I then called my teacher over, and pointed to that answer. Recalling the video, I asked him if I could rewrite that -1/12 as 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+... as my final answer. Thankfully, he got the reference. In addition to being a funny anecdote, the fact that people got the joke shows how wide of an audience this information has reached and captivated, which is amazing to see.