Solution Using Maple

Since the summation developed in the previous section is very difficult to evaluate by hand, let's call Maple to the rescue. The following three Maple commands (typed at your Maple prompt), produce a floating-point approximation to the numeric value of .

VS := sum((((2*i/(2*n+1))*(1/n)/sqrt(((2*i)/(2*n+1)-1/2)^2 + (1/2)^2)),i=-n,n);

VS1 := limit(VS, n=infinity);

evalf(VS1);

Remember the result that you obtain as you read the section which describes a continous model for the problem at hand, and expresses the scaled potential as a 1-D integral.