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HSC 2016 MX2 Integration Marathon (archive) (6 Viewers)

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InteGrand

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Are you sure it has a nice closed form? My first substitution was which made the integral to to by integration by parts, and I'm pretty sure that second integral doesn't have a closed form solution.
Yeah that second integral can't be found using elementary functions (requires a Fresnel Integral). The C in the WolframAlpha output refers to a Fresnel Integral (a non-elementary function). More about Fresnel Integrals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_integral
 

omegadot

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon



 
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seanieg89

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Any hint on how to get the solution? Haven't seen these enough to know a starting point
Key ingredients (in my solution at least):

1.

You can assume this if you don't know how to prove it, but it has been done before in this and similar threads, and is within MX2 scope although slightly tricky (you would be guided through it slowly in an exam question).

2. Basic trig manipulation, and trig limits.
 

seanieg89

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

So I guess a natural followup question then if it hasn't been done recently is to prove that:



which I ask people to attempt separately (with MX2 appropriate methods).
 

omegadot

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Yeesh, such specificity.

Substitute in order to translate the binomial term to the top. Expand using the binomial theorem and bring down all powers. Integrate accordingly.
 

Drsoccerball

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Wolfram says that the integral doesn't converge... Also if this isn't true is the answer 0 ?
 

seanieg89

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Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Wolfram says that the integral doesn't converge... Also if this isn't true is the answer 0 ?
The integral actually does converge because it decays as x^(-2) and does not blow up anywhere finite.

Notice that sometimes we work with integrals that aren't convergent in the traditional sense though, like the sin(x)/x integral. when we talk about integrating this thing over the real line, we are really just talking about taking the Cauchy principal value integral of this quantity. (In the case of the sin(x)/x integrand, this is the limit of the integral over the interval [-R,R] as R->inf.)

For convergent integrals over R, it wouldn't matter at what "rate" we sent the two limits to the respective ends of the real line, but for things that are not integrable (because of not decaying fast enough at the boundary, not because of regularity) it does, and we need to specify something like the Cauchy principal value to unambiguously make sense of "the integral of f over the reals".

The answer is not 0 either.
 
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