Arithmetic-harmonic mean
I've written several times about the arithmetic-geometric mean and variations. Take the arithmetic and geometric mean of two positive numbers a and b. Then take the arithmetic and geometric of the means from the previous step. Repeat ad infinitum and the result converges to a limit. This limit is called the arthmetic-geometric mean or AGM.
What if instead of repeatedly taking the arithmetic and geometric means, we repeatedly take the arithmetic and harmonic means? That is, first define
and for integer n > 0 define
and take the limit. We could call this the arithmetic-harmonic mean by analogy with the arithmetic-geometric mean. But it already has another name: the geometric mean! The iteration defined above converges to the geometric mean (ab). Not only that, it converges quickly.
We can illustrate this with a little Python code.
a, b = 4, 9 for _ in range(5): a, b = (a + b)/2, 2*a*b/(a + b) print(a, b)
This prints the following.
6.5 5.538461538461538 6.019230769230769 5.980830670926518 6.000030720078644 5.999969280078643 6.000000000078643 5.999999999921357 6.0 6.0More on the AGMThe post Arithmetic-harmonic mean first appeared on John D. Cook.