6 INTEGRALS: THE BASICS

A typical calculus course (or set of courses) is broken up into a part on derivatives and related topics (“differential calculus”) followed by a course about integrals (“integral calculus”). As we saw in Chapter 1, this distinction is arbitrary since the two are just inverses. It’s sort of like teaching addition and subtraction separately and calling them “additive arithmetic” and “subtractive arithmetic.”

Part of the reason for the traditional split is that integrals can be fussier to compute than derivatives. Some integrals have to have extensive algebra done on them to get them into a form that can be integrated. You can look up formulas for many of them in “integral tables” like those in the intimidating CRC Standard ...

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