xrtzx said:
wow KFunk, how did u work all that out? do u have any tips for these type of questions??
Sorry about the delay, I'd tried to post a message the other night but I geuss it didn't make it through the BOS lag so I'll try and remember what I wrote.
For the above question I could be pretty sure that int. by parts is qhat was required and the two parts I chose were the ones which seemed most obvious. After choosing how to split it up I was quickly able to see that it was going to produce a 'cosnx.cos<sup>n-1</sup>x' term which is part of the answer so I figured it was the right way to go. The integral I was working with quickly yielded: cos<sup>n-2</sup>xsin(n-1)xsin<sup>2</sup>x and after a quick inspection you will realise that turning the sin<sup>2</sup>x into (1 - cos<sup>2</sup>x) will give you a J<sub>n-1</sub> term. Once I had isolated that I figured that I just had to manipulate the rest of what was left to get a J<sub>n</sub> term to move over.
In terms of general tips, here is the best I can come up with at the moment:
- More than anything read the damn question or you'll end up doing what I did and going through a whole lot of unnecesary working when they're handing it to you on a silver platter.
- Most reduction questions tell you what you're trying to show. This is an invaluable reference point. If you look at the way I did the question above, it basically all hinges on manipulating parts of the expression to get it closer to the solution.
- watch out for simple tricks where you might not have to use integration by parts especially when all you need is some simple trig manipulation eg. ∫tan<sup>n</sup>x dx which can be made incredibly easy using trig manipulation.
- A common trick which comes up is where you have something of the form ∫ (x<sup>2</sup>+1)<sup>n-1</sup>.P(x) dx where you want to make up another power to get a power of 'n' for an I<sup>n</sup> term. In this case you can simply add and subtract x<sup>2</sup>(x<sup>2</sup>+1)<sup>n-1</sup>.P(x) so you get an I<sup>n</sup> term and something else which you have to play around with.
I hope that was the kind of stuff you were looking for.