Harmonic recursion

Asked Sep 10 '20 at 23:58

Active Sep 10 '20 at 23:58

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I am currently working on a harmonic sequence problem recursively and I keep getting an error message that says "at LinearRecursion.harmonicSum(LinearRecursion.java:59)" this is my code for the harmonic problem. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

public static double harmonicSum(int n) {
        if(n == 1)
        {
            return 1.0;
        }
        else
        {
            return (1.0 / n) + harmonicSum(n - 1);
        }
    }

asked Sep 10 '20 at 23:58

Olivia Leath

You did not post the error message but sounds like dividing by zero – m.antkowicz Sep 11 '20 at 00:01
when I run that code it just says "at LinearRecursion.harmonicSum(LinearRecursion.java:59)" – Olivia Leath Sep 11 '20 at 00:03
2

Any time you call that method you will have a divide by zero exception. Your if statement will always evaluate to false because you are comparing a floating point number to an integer. Try using `<=` instead of `==`. – Charlie Armstrong Sep 11 '20 at 00:09
Also your provided error message only says which line has the error but not the error itself – Tyro Sep 11 '20 at 01:01
Does this answer your question? [Harmonic sequence recursion](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12904284/harmonic-sequence-recursion) – Tyro Sep 11 '20 at 01:08
thank you I was able to figure it out ``` – Olivia Leath Sep 11 '20 at 01:25
i used 0 as my base case and had it return 0 and the program worked – Olivia Leath Sep 11 '20 at 01:26

Harmonic recursion

0 Answers0