Friday, April 12, 2019

sequences and series - Is the sum of natural numbers equal to $-frac{1}{8}$?

I came across the following video on YouTube: Sum of all natural numbers (- 1/8).


Basically what happens is: \begin{align*} 1+2+3+\dotsb &= N \\ 1+(2+3+4)+(5+6+7)+\dotsb &= N\\ 1+9+18+27+\dotsb &= N\\ 1+9(1+2+3+4+\dotsb)&= N\\ 1+9N &= N \end{align*} and therefore $N=-\frac{1}{8}$.


This is directly in contradiction with the well-known result of $-\frac{1}{12}$.


What is the problem with this reasoning? Was this result discovered earlier? Is this a consequence of Riemann's Rearrangement Theorem? Thanks in advance.


This was a repost of my previous post because some people said it was a duplicate to "Why is the sum of natural numbers $-1/12$?"

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