m a t h2441- b c i t commons（m t h2441 b c我不共享）.docVIP

MATH 1441 Technical Mathematics for Biological Sciences Integration: The Substitution Method This short document illustrates the so-called method of substitution for determining antiderivatives or indefinite integrals in its simplest form: the integration of powers of functions. As developed here, the method of substitution effectively amounts to reversing the special form (1) of the chain rule, which is a familiar basic method of finding derivatives of powers of functions. In the next document in this series, we extend this method of substitution to the more general form of the chain rule, (2) which handles any function of u, not just simple powers. This will make it possible to extend the method of substitution to any integral which fits a pattern you can find in one of many published tables of integral formulas -- some of which contain thousands of entries. As a result, the method of substitution is the basis of the most generally useful method for finding integrals. Essentially, all that the method of substitution involves is checking (perhaps by trial and failure, or better, trial and success) to recast the integral (3) into the form (4) by introducing some appropriate substitution, u = u(x). Then, using the elementary methods described in the previous document introducing integral calculus, we would get (5) Of course, before declaring the final result for such an indefinite integral, (3), the symbol u must be replaced by its equivalent in terms of x, since u itself will be introduced as an aid for organizing our thoughts and is not a part of the original problem at all. When definite integrals are involved, this last step is not strictly necessary, as well demonstrate near the end of this document. To avoid one of the most common sources of error in applying the method of substitution, you must note that in the proposed transformation of the indefinite integral (6a) two parts of t