Chapter 10

Trig Substitution: Knowing All the (Tri)Angles

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Memorizing the basic trig integrals

Bullet Integrating powers of sines and cosines, tangents and secants, and cotangents and cosecants

Bullet Understanding the three cases for using trig substitution

Bullet Avoiding trig substitution when possible

Trig substitution is another technique to throw into your ever-expanding bag of integration tricks. It allows you to integrate functions that contain radicals of polynomials such as math and other similar difficult functions.

Trig substitution may remind you of variable substitution, which I discuss in Chapter 8. With both types of substitution, you break the function that you want to integrate into pieces and express each piece in terms of a new variable. With trig substitution, however, you express these pieces as trig functions.

So before you can do trig substitution, you need to be able to integrate a wider variety of products and powers of trig functions. The first few parts of this chapter ...

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