Mathematic Extreme Technique

The first documented systematic technique capable of determining integrals is the method of exhaustion of the ancient Greek astronomer Eudoxus (ca. 370 BC), which sought to find areas and volumes by breaking them up into an infinite number of shapes for which the area or volume was known. This method was further developed and employed by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC and used to calculate areas for parabolas and an approximation to the area of a circle. Similar methods were independently developed in China around the 3rd century AD by Liu Hui, who used it to find the area of the circle. This method was later used in the 5th century by Chinese father-and-son mathematicians Zu Chongzhi and Zu Geng to find the volume of a sphere (Shea 2007; Katz 2004, pp. 125–126).

The next significant advances in integral calculus did not begin to appear until the 16th century. At this time the work of Cavalieri with his method of indivisibles, and work by Fermat, began to lay the foundations of modern calculus, with Cavalieri computing the integrals of xⁿ up to degree n = 9 in Cavalieri's quadrature formula. Further steps were made in the early 17th century by Barrow and Torricelli, who provided the first hints of a connection between integration and differentiation. Barrow provided the first proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. Wallis generalized Cavalieri's method, computing integrals of x to a general power, including negative powers and fractional powers.

Newton and Leibniz

The major advance in integration came in the 17th century with the independent discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. The theorem demonstrates a connection between integration and differentiation. This connection, combined with the comparative ease of differentiation, can be exploited to calculate integrals. In particular, the fundamental theorem of calculus allows one to solve a much broader class of problems. Equal in importance is the comprehensive mathematical framework that both Newton and Leibniz developed. Given the name infinitesimal calculus, it allowed for precise analysis of functions within continuous domains. This framework eventually became modern calculus, whose notation for integrals is drawn directly from the work of Leibniz.

Formalizing integrals

While Newton and Leibniz provided a systematic approach to integration, their work lacked a degree of rigour. Bishop Berkeley memorably attacked the vanishing increments used by Newton, calling them "ghosts of departed quantities". Calculus acquired a firmer footing with the development of limits. Integration was first rigorously formalized, using limits, by Riemann. Although all bounded piecewise continuous functions are Riemann integrable on a bounded interval, subsequently more general functions were considered – particularly in the context of Fourier analysis – to which Riemann's definition does not apply, and Lebesgue formulated a different definition of integral, founded in measure theory (a subfield of real analysis). Other definitions of integral, extending Riemann's and Lebesgue's approaches, were proposed. These approaches based on the real number system are the ones most common today, but alternative approaches exist, such as a definition of integral as the standard part of an infinite Riemann sum, based on the hyperreal number system.

Historical notation

Isaac Newton used a small vertical bar above a variable to indicate integration, or placed the variable inside a box. The vertical bar was easily confused with or , which Newton used to indicate differentiation, and the box notation was difficult for printers to reproduce, so these notations were not widely adopted.

The modern notation for the indefinite integral was introduced by Gottfried Leibniz in 1675 (Burton 1988, p. 359; Leibniz 1899, p. 154). He adapted the integral symbol, ∫, from the letter ſ (long s), standing for summa (written as ſumma; Latin for "sum" or "total"). The modern notation for the definite integral, with limits above and below the integral sign, was first used by Joseph Fourier in Mémoires of the French Academy around 1819–20, reprinted in his book of 1822 (Cajori 1929, pp. 249–250; Fourier 1822, §231).

Integral Basic

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Integration is an important concept in mathematics and, together with its inverse, differentiation, is one of the two main operations in calculus. Given a function f of a real variable x and an interval [a, b] of the real line, the definite integral

is defined informally to be the area of the region in the xy-plane bounded by the graph of f, the x-axis, and the vertical lines x = a and x = b, such that area above the x-axis adds to the total, and that below the x-axis subtracts from the total.

The term integral may also refer to the notion of the antiderivative, a function F whose derivative is the given function f. In this case, it is called an indefinite integral and is written:

The integrals discussed in this article are termed definite integrals.

The principles of integration were formulated independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the late 17th century. Through the fundamental theorem of calculus, which they independently developed, integration is connected with differentiation: if f is a continuous real-valued function defined on a closed interval [a, b], then, once an antiderivative F of f is known, the definite integral of f over that interval is given by

Integrals and derivatives became the basic tools of calculus, with numerous applications in science and engineering. The founders of the calculus thought of the integral as an infinite sum of rectangles of infinitesimal width. A rigorous mathematical definition of the integral was given by Bernhard Riemann. It is based on a limiting procedure which approximates the area of a curvilinear region by breaking the region into thin vertical slabs. Beginning in the nineteenth century, more sophisticated notions of integrals began to appear, where the type of the function as well as the domain over which the integration is performed has been generalised. A line integral is defined for functions of two or three variables, and the interval of integration [a, b] is replaced by a certain curve connecting two points on the plane or in the space. In a surface integral, the curve is replaced by a piece of a surface in the three-dimensional space. Integrals of differential forms play a fundamental role in modern differential geometry. These generalizations of integrals first arose from the needs of physics, and they play an important role in the formulation of many physical laws, notably those of electrodynamics. There are many modern concepts of integration, among these, the most common is based on the abstract mathematical theory known as Lebesgue integration , developed by Henri Lebesgue .