Section 4-9 : Absolute Convergence/Divergence

When we first talked about series convergence we briefly mentioned a stronger type of convergence but
didn’t do anything with it because we didn’t have any tools at our disposal that we could use to work
problems involving it. We now have some of those tools so it’s now time to talk about absolute
convergence in detail.

First, let’s go back over the definition of absolute convergence.

Definition
A series ∑a n is called absolutely convergent if ∑a n is convergent. If ∑an is convergent and

∑a n is divergent we call the series conditionally convergent.

We also have the following fact about absolute convergence.

Fact
If ∑a n is absolutely convergent then it is also convergent.

Proof
First notice that an is either an or it is −an depending on its sign. This means that we can then
say,
0 ≤ an + an ≤ 2 an

Now, since we are assuming that ∑a n is convergent then ∑2 a n is also convergent since we
can just factor the 2 out of the series and 2 times a finite value will still be finite. This however allows
us to use the Comparison Test to say that ∑(a n + an ) is also a convergent series.
Finally, we can write,
∑ a = ∑(a
n n + an ) − ∑ an
and so ∑a n is the difference of two convergent series and so is also convergent.

This fact is one of the ways in which absolute convergence is a “stronger” type of convergence. Series
that are absolutely convergent are guaranteed to be convergent. However, series that are convergent
may or may not be absolutely convergent.

Let’s take a quick look at a couple of examples of absolute convergence.

Example 1 Determine if each of the following series are absolute convergent, conditionally
convergent or divergent.
( −1)
n
∞
(a) ∑
n =1 n
( −1)
n+2
∞
(b) ∑
n =1 n2
∞
sin n
(c) ∑
n =1 n
3

Solution
( −1)
n
∞
(a) ∑
n =1 n

This is the alternating harmonic series and we saw in the last section that it is a convergent series so
we don’t need to check that here. So, let’s see if it is an absolutely convergent series. To do this we’ll
need to check the convergence of.
( −1)
n
∞ ∞
1
=
∑n
n 1= n 1 n
=∑

This is the harmonic series and we know from the integral test section that it is divergent.

Therefore, this series is not absolutely convergent. It is however conditionally convergent since the
series itself does converge.

( −1)
n+2
∞
(b) ∑
n =1 n2

In this case let’s just check absolute convergence first since if it’s absolutely convergent we won’t
need to bother checking convergence as we will get that for free.
( −1)
n+2
∞ ∞
1
=
∑2
n 1= n 1 n
=∑
n2

This series is convergent by the p-series test and so the series is absolute convergent. Note that this
does say as well that it’s a convergent series.
 ∞
sin n
(c) ∑
n =1 n
3

In this part we need to be a little careful. First, this is NOT an alternating series and so we can’t use
any tools from that section.

What we’ll do here is check for absolute convergence first again since that will also give convergence.
This means that we need to check the convergence of the following series.
∞
∞
sin n sin n
=
∑
n 1=n 3
= ∑
n 1 n3

To do this we’ll need to note that

−1 ≤ sin n ≤ 1 ⇒ sin n ≤ 1
and so we have,
sin n 1
3
≤
n n3

Now we know that

∞
1
∑nn =1
3

converges by the p-series test and so by the Comparison Test we also know that
∞
sin n
∑n =1 n3
converges.

Therefore, the original series is absolutely convergent (and hence convergent).

Let’s close this section off by recapping a topic we saw earlier. When we first discussed the convergence
of series in detail we noted that we can’t think of series as an infinite sum because some series can have
different sums if we rearrange their terms. In fact, we gave two rearrangements of an Alternating
Harmonic series that gave two different values. We closed that section off with the following fact,

Facts
Given the series ∑a n ,

1. If ∑a n is absolutely convergent and its value is s then any rearrangement of ∑an will also
have a value of s.
 2. If ∑a n is conditionally convergent and r is any real number then there is a rearrangement
of ∑ a n whose value will be r.

Now that we’ve got the tools under our belt to determine absolute and conditional convergence we can
make a few more comments about this.

First, as we showed above in Example 1a an Alternating Harmonic is conditionally convergent and so no

matter what value we chose there is some rearrangement of terms that will give that value. Note as
well that this fact does not tell us what that rearrangement must be only that it does exist.

Next, we showed in Example 1b that,

( −1)
n+2
∞

∑n2
n =1

is absolutely convergent and so no matter how we rearrange the terms of this series we’ll always get the
same value. In fact, it can be shown that the value of this series is,
( −1)
n+2
∞
π2
∑
n =1 n2
= −
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