Ramanujan summation and the exponential generating function $\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}\frac{z^{k}}{k!}\zeta^{\prime}(-k)$

Abstract

In the sixth chapter of his notebooks, Ramanujan introduced a method of summing divergent series which assigns to the series the value of the associated Euler-MacLaurin constant that arises by applying the Euler-MacLaurin summation formula to the partial sums of the series. This method is now called the Ramanujan summation process. In this paper we calculate the Ramanujan sum of the exponential generating functions ∑n≥1log n enz and \(\sum_{n\geq 1}H_{n}^{(j)}~e^{-nz}\) where \(H_{n}^{(j)}=\sum_{m=1}^{n}\frac{1}{m^{j}}\) . We find a surprising relation between the two sums when j=1 from which follows a formula that connects the derivatives of the Riemann zeta-function at the negative integers to the Ramanujan sum of the divergent Euler sums ∑n≥1nkHn, k ≥ 0, where \(H_{n}=H_{n}^{(1)}\) . Further, we express our results on the Ramanujan summation in terms of the classical summation process called the Borel sum.