(If you need a primer on series in general, check out 

this explanation. It gives an

introduction to what a series is and dips a bit into the ideas of convergent and
divergent series, so it's a good place to start.)

A convergent series is a series whose partial sums tend to a specific number,

also called a limit. A divergent series is a series whose partial sums, by
contrast, don't approach a limit. Divergent series typically go to ∞, go to −∞, or
don't approach one specific number.

An easy example of a convergent series is

1 1 1 1
∞∑n=1 ½ n= + + + +⋯
2 4 8 16

The partial sums look like

1 3 7 15
, , ,
2 4 8 16

and we can see that they get closer and closer to 1. The first partial sum
is 12 away, the second 14 away, and so on and so forth until it is infinitely close to 1.
This means that the above series converges to a limit at 1!

(The ! does not indicate a factorial, although in the case of 1!=1 it wouldn't matter.
Limits are just exciting.)

The convergence of different series is a very relevant topic in higher math and
many significant mathematical discoveries revolve around different series, but for
the purposes of Algebra 2 we can mainly concern ourselves with whether or not
geometric series will converge.

Given a geometric series with common ratio r, it will converge whenever |r|<1. This
should make intuitive sense because if we had a geometric series with a common
ratio of say, 2, we would have something that looks like

∞∑n=02n=1+2+4+8+16+⋯

Clearly the numbers we are adding to the sum get larger and larger, so the sum
would never slow down and approach a specific limit. This is an example of a
divergent series.

Similarly, if the common ratio is −2, the series

 ∞∑n=0(−2)n=1−2+4−8+16−32+⋯

will also diverge. A way to better see this is

∞

∑ =0(−2)n=(1−2)+(4−8)+(16−32)+⋯
n=0

=−1−4−16−⋯

=−∞∑n=04n

which is clearly divergent.

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