Example 1 an indenite integral and partial fractions I chose this example of an indenite integral at random from the Mathematical

l Handbook of Fomulas and Tables by M.R.Spiegel (1968). This is part of the very useful Schaum Outline Series. You will nd a text with worked examples on nearly every topic including vectors, calculus, dierential equations and dynamics. In this edition of the Handbook it is formula 14.323. x2 (x4 1 1 dx = 4 + 5 ln 4 a ) a x 4a xa x+a + 1 x tan1 5 2a a

Often you see alternative notation for the functions, namely ln log and tan1 arctan. I prefer these. For an indenite integral we should add a constant +c to the result. As an exercise I suggested dierentiating the answer and verifying the integrand. To do this you need
d 1 dx x d dx d dx

= x12
1 x 1 x2 +1

log x =

arctan x =

These are standard results that you should know. Suggestion: start building up a collection of such basic formulae in a notebook. Of course by dierentiating we are working backwards and this seems like cheating. You probably feel that we should start with the integral and apply some techniques to evaluate it. However, despite any impression that you may have from textbooks, in practice mathematicians solve problems from any direction. The best mathematicians in their research have an intuitive feeling for the answer. They are quite happy to work backwards if it helps to solve the problem. In this example by dierentiating the answer we reveal the technique. This is to write the integrand as partial fractions which are standard integrals. You may have seen partial fractions with linear denominators. In this case they are quadratic. Before doing this we can simplify the integral by getting rid of the constant a. We do this by changing variable to y = x/a. Then x2 (x4 1 dx = 5 4 a ) a 1 of 2 y 2 (y 4 dy 1) October 9, 2009 11:15am

We write (remember y 4 1 is the dierence of two squares) 1 y 2 (y 4 + 2 + 2 2 1) y y 1 y +1 4 (y 1) + y 2(y 2 + 1) + y 2 (y 2 1) = y 2 (y 4 1) 4 ( + + )y + ( )y 2 = y 2(y 4 1) =

Comparing coecients we have ++ = 0 = 0 = 1 with a solution = 1 and = = 1 . Therefore 2 y 2 (y 4 dy 1 dy dy dy = +2 +1 2 2 2 2 1) y y 1 y +1 1 1 y1 = +1 + 4 log arctan y 2 y y+1

using standard integrals. Multiply by 1/a5 and let y = x/a to give formula 14.323. Add these integrals to your notebook.
dx x 2 1 dx x2 +1

1 2

log

x 1 x+1

= arctan x

The rst is obtained by writing (partial fractions again) x2 1 1 = 1 2 1 1 x1 x+1

The second is obtained using the substitution x = tan .

2 of 2

October 9, 2009 11:15am