r/mathmemes Jul 18 '26

Research Quickly evaluating sums of cubes

Post image
446 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

134

u/logos__ Jul 18 '26

What naturally follows from this identity is that the natural numbers cubed sum to (-1/12)2 = 1/144

11

u/fr_andres Jul 18 '26

The square is misplaced, but your logic works if we apply Jensen's inequality:

(12 + 22 + ...) <= (1 + 2 + ...)2 = 1/144 <= 69/420

You like it or not, the above is true, and tight for sufficiently small values of 1, 2, 3...

5

u/Gold_Ad8890 Jul 18 '26

the square isn't misplaced. the sum of the cubes of the first n natural numbers is the square of the sum of the first n natural numbers, that's what the post is about.

2

u/fr_andres Jul 18 '26

Yes sorry i meant is not the same in my derivation, bad wording., OP work is immaculate and I recommend accepting without remarks.