A Pascal Triangle Type Calculation for a Particular Infinite Series

Abstract

In general, finding the sum of an infinite series is not always possible. However, there are infinite series whose sums can be computed. In our earlier paper, we derived a formula for computing the sum of a type of polylogarithm series involving multinomial coefficients. In this paper, we show that the formula leads to an elementary computation for the series $\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}\frac{k^n}{a^k}$ involving numbers obtained by a method similar to Pascal's triangle. We also show that our result is the number of ways of distributing $n$ distinct objects in $n$ or fewer distinct nonempty cells.