Karylle from Marinduque wants to know how you can find the ratio in an infinite geometric series, if you know that the sum is a particular multiple of the first term.

This is in that interesting class of problems in which you feel like you don't have enough information to solve it. After all, there are a lot of unknowns (the first term, the ratio, and the sum) and you'll only have one equation to work with. Whenever my students have problems like this, I tell them to simplify the equation as much as possible, and see what happens!

So let's take an example.  Let's say that you know the sum of the infinite series is 5 times the first term. Can you find the common ratio?

Well, the sum of the series is a/(1 - r), and that is 5a.

a/(1 - r) - 5a = 0

Ah...I see what's going to happen already - the a is going to factor out:

a(1/(1 - r) - 5) = 0

so either a = 0 (in which case, r could be anything, right? It's a really boring series, with all the terms equal to zero, but hey, it works!) or 1/(1 - r) = 5. This leads to:

5 - 5r = 1

5r = 4

r = 4/5

I would be inclined to say that the problem should be reworded to state that the first term is not 0, in order to avoid having "r can be any real number" as the answer. If you add in that proviso, then the answer is r = 4/5.

Hope that helps, Karylle!

Professor Puzzler