A curious result related to Kempner's series

Abstract

It is well known since A. J. Kempner's work that the series of the reciprocals of the positive integers whose the decimal representation does not contain any digit 9, is convergent. This result was extended by F. Irwin and others to deal with the series of the reciprocals of the positive integers whose the decimal representation contains only a limited quantity of each digit of a given nonempty set of digits. Actually, such series are known to be all convergent. Here, letting $S^{(r)}$ $(r \in \mathbb{N})$ denote the series of the reciprocal of the positive integers whose the decimal representation contains the digit 9 exactly $r$ times, the impressive obtained result is that $S^{(r)}$ tends to $10 \log{10}$ as $r$ tends to infinity!Comment: 5 pages, to appear in (The) American Mathematical Monthl