sutton025

Integration is a vast topic with many diverse techniques meant to help find the integrals of functions. Many delightful and elegant methods are used to tackle difficult integrals. This video series talks about a few of the less common, but still very useful, techniques. These videos cover topics such as the tangent half-angle substitution, integration with a parameter, and how symmetry in integrals can be useful. 

The first conception of this episode was to prove that the rationals are a dense within the reals, which is an algebraic proof showing that between any two real numbers, there is a rational number. This proof does not define the real numbers, and treats them as some empirical fact that you know; yet, once the real numbers are constructed, the proof is really trivial. The proof used in this episode utilizes an analytic definition of dense sets: if a set `A’ along with its limit points equals the `B’, then `A’ is a dense set within `B’. You will see that we construct the reals in such a way that the rationals are dense within the reals. But first, a little background. First, we construct the natural numbers using Peano’s Axioms, and the integers can be constructed many different ways from the natural numbers (think including additive inverses). From the integers, the rational numbers are all ratios of two integers. These ratios can be thought of as finite decimal expansions, and we will ...