criterion for interchanging summation and integration
The following criterion for interchanging integration and summationis often useful in practise: Suppose one has a sequence of measurablefunctions (The index runs overnon-negative integers.) on some measure space
and can find another sequence of measurablefunctions such that for all and almost all and converges for almost all and . Then
This criterion is a corollary of the monotone and dominatedconvergence theorems. Since the ’s are nonnegative, thesequence of partial sums is increasing, hence, by the monotoneconvergence theorem
, .Since converges for almost all ,
the dominated convergence theorem implies that we may integratethe sequence of partial sums term-by-term, which is tantamount tosaying that we may switch integration and summation.
As an example of this method, consider the following:
The idea behind the method is to pick our ’s as simple as possibleso that it is easy to integrate them and apply the criterion. A goodchoice here is . We then have and, as, we can interchange summationand integration:
Doing the integrals, we obtain the answer