integration – Mathemafrica

Fundamental theorem of calculus example

We did an example today in class which I wanted to go through again here. The question was to calculate

$\frac{d}{dx}\int_a^{x^4}\sec t dt$

We spot the pattern immediately that it’s an FTC part 1 type question, but it’s not quite there yet. In the FTC part 1, the upper limit of the integral is just $x$ , and not $x^4$ . A question that we would be able to answer is:

$\frac{d}{dx}\int_a^{x}\sec t dt$

This would just be $\sec x$ . Or, of course, we can show that in exactly the same way:

$\frac{d}{du}\int_a^{u}\sec t dt=\sec u$

That’s just changing the names of the variables, which is fine, right? But that’s not quite the question. So, how can we convert from $x^4$ to $u$ ? Well, how about a substitution? How about letting $x^4=u$ and seeing what happens. This is actually just a chain rule. It’s like if I asked you to calculate:

$\frac{d}{dx} g(x^4)$ .

You would just say: Let $x^4=u$ and then we have:

$\frac{d}{dx} g(x^4)=\frac{du}{dx}\frac{d}{du}g(u)=4x^3 g'(u)$ .…

By Jonathan Shock| July 23rd, 2018|Courses, English, First year, Level: intermediate, MAM1000, Undergraduate|0 Comments

Some more volume visualisations

Here is an animation which may help you imaging a shape which has a circular base, with parallel slices perpendicular to the base being equilateral triangles:

The same thing, where the slices are squares.

And here is the region in the (x,y) plane between $y=\sqrt{x}$ , the x-axis and the line x=1. rotated about the y-axis. Here a thin shell is drawn in the volume, then pulled out. Then it is replaced, then the volume is filled with shells, and each of them is pulled out of the volume vertically. This is to give you an idea about how to visualise the method of cylindrical shells.

How clear is this post?

…

By Jonathan Shock| September 14th, 2017|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|1 Comment

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Guidelines for visualising and calculating volumes of revolution

Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate

Guidelines for visualising and calculating volumes of revolution

I have seen some people try to blindly use the formulae for volumes of revolution by cylindrical cross-sections and by cylindrical shells, and I thought that I would write a guide as to how I would recommend tackling such problems, as generally just using the formulae will lead you down blind alleys.

I’ve created an example, with an animation, which I hope will help to master this technique.

So, here is a relatively fool-proof strategy:

Draw the region which you are going to have to rotate around some axis. This will generally be a matter of:
- Drawing the curves that you have been given
- Finding where they intersect
Draw the line about which you are supposed to rotate the region
Draw the reflection of the region about the line of rotation: This gives you a slice through the volume that will be formed
Now you have to decide which method to use:
- Take a slice through the volume perpendicular to the axis of rotation.

…

By Jonathan Shock| September 13th, 2017|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|2 Comments

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MAM1000W 2017 semester 2, lecture 1 (part i)

Courses, English, First year, Level: Simple, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate

MAM1000W 2017 semester 2, lecture 1 (part i)

I wanted to put up a little summary of some of the most important things to remember from the end of last semester. There was a sudden input of new concepts, so let’s put some of them down here to get a clear reminder of what we need to know. A few things in this post:

The antiderivative
Sigma notation
Areas under curves

Antiderivatives

An antiderivative of a function $f$ on an open interval $I$ is a function $F$ such that:

$F'(x)=f(x)$ for every $x\in I$

Note that we say an antiderivative, not the antiderivative. There can be many functions whose derivatives give the same thing. While we know that:

$\frac{d}{dx}\sin x=\cos x$

and therefore $\sin x$ is an antiderivative of $\cos x$ , we can also say that:

$\frac{d}{dx}(\sin x+3)=\cos x$

So $\sin x+3$ is also an antiderivative of $\cos x$ . In fact for any constant $c$ it is true that $\sin x+c$ is an antiderivative of $\cos x$ . We will come up with some clever notation for the antiderivative soon.…

By Jonathan Shock| August 13th, 2017|Courses, English, First year, Level: Simple, MAM1000, Uncategorized, Undergraduate|1 Comment

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Picturing volumes of revolution

Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate

Picturing volumes of revolution

One of the homework questions this week was the following:

Let $R=\{(x,y)\in \mathbb{R}^2:y\ge 0, \cos x\le y\le \sin x\,\,and\,\,0\le x\le\pi\}.$

a) Sketch the region R and find its area.
b) Find the volume of the solid obtained by rotating the region R around the y-axis.

The first thing to do is to sketch the graphs of $y=\cos x$ and $y=\sin x$ . Once you’ve done that, the other parts of the inequalities should be clear. It should look like the red region in the following plot:

Now we have to imagine bringing out a third axis, perpendicular to the picture above, ie. coming out towards us. We then want to rotate the red form here about the vertical axis. This we can imagine doing in the following animation:

Given this form we can then think about either taking horizontal cross-sections through it, which will give us thin annuli, or we can take vertical, circular slices to give us thin shells. Adding these together and integrating should give us the same answer whichever way we choose to slice it, but one way will be considerably easier.…

By Jonathan Shock| August 4th, 2016|Courses, First year, MAM1000, Undergraduate|1 Comment