Sam Walters posted something interesting on Twitter yesterday I hadn’t seem before:
The sines of the positive integers have just the right balance of pluses and minuses to keep their sum in a fixed interval. (Not hard to show.) #math pic.twitter.com/RxeoWg6bhn
— Sam Walters ☕️ (@SamuelGWalters) November 29, 2018
If for some reason your browser doesn’t render the embedded tweet, he points out that
for all positive integers N.
Here’s a little Python script to illustrate the sum in his tweet.
from scipy import sin, arange import matplotlib.pyplot as plt x = arange(1,100) y = sin(x).cumsum() plt.plot(x, y) plt.plot((1, 100), (-1/7, -1/7), "g--") plt.plot((1, 100), (2, 2), "g--") plt.savefig("sinsum.svg")
Exponential sums
Exponential sums are interesting because crude application of the triangle inequality won’t get you anywhere. All it will let you conclude is that the sum is between –N and N.
(Why is this an exponential sum? Because it’s the imaginary part of the sum over ein.)
For more on exponential sums, you might like the book Uniform Distribution of Sequences.
Also, I have a page that displays the plot of a different exponential sum each day, the coefficients in the sum
being taking from the day’s date. Because consecutive numbers have very different number theoretic properties, the images vary quite a bit from day to day.
I find the ExpSum page to be great fun. Even more so once you mess with the URL. I put in my birth month and day, then cycled through the years. A few of the plots were absolutely beautiful!
May I use one as my personal logo?
Is the fact about the sum of the sines of integers an ergodicity thing?
@Andrew: Yes, this is related to ergodicity.
ExpSum suggestions:
1. Add an icon for the day’s graphic (linked to its page) next to the date in your blog posts.
2. Give ExpSum its own auto-posting Twitter/Mastodon/Instagram (etc.) account.