• Congratulations to the Class of 2024 on your results!
    Let us know how you went here
    Got a question about your uni preferences? Ask us here

HSC 2016 MX2 Integration Marathon (archive) (2 Viewers)

Status
Not open for further replies.

seanieg89

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 8, 2006
Messages
2,662
Gender
Male
HSC
2007
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Okay, would people like me to post a solution to my old one then? Or is anyone still trying it?
 

Drsoccerball

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 28, 2014
Messages
3,650
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2015
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Can easily be solved by a substitution.
As a wise man named DJ Khaled once said

Another one:

 

seanieg89

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 8, 2006
Messages
2,662
Gender
Male
HSC
2007
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Okay, I think it's been long enough so I will post my solution.

If you feel you are making progress then keep trying yourself before reading the below!!




For starters, let's assume a and b are positive, as changing the sign of one of these guys literally just changes the sign of the integral, as sine is odd.



by basic trigonometric manipulations (specifically, product to differences and the half angle formula.) The motivation for the second manipulation is that the denominator tends to zero as x -> 0. This means that if we want to split the integral up as a sum or difference, the parts of the numerator should each tend to zero as well. so sines are good but cos's are bad.

So we have now reduced it to studying integrals of the form



where the third inequality came from integrating by parts, noting that the boundary term decays as 1/R and hence vanishes in the limit.

Now it is tempting to conclude that this final quantity is nothing more than the principal value integral of sin(x)/x over the real line. HOWEVER, there is a subtlety caused by c's sign! Note that if c is negative, then this final integral is negatively oriented! This means that in this case we will actually get the negative of the principal value integral. Hence we have



where the sgn function is defined to be 1 on the positive reals, -1 on the negative reals, and 0 at zero.

Plugging this back into our most recent expression for I, we get



The surprising upshot: the integral does not vary if you change the larger of the two parameters, but it does if you change the smaller one!
 
Last edited:

seanieg89

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 8, 2006
Messages
2,662
Gender
Male
HSC
2007
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Note that following my own suggestion, I assumed knowledge of the sin(x)/x integral in order to compute the above.

So treating it as a separate question, prove that:



I will give students a little more time to have a crack at this famous integral before I post an evaluation of it too.
 

seanieg89

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 8, 2006
Messages
2,662
Gender
Male
HSC
2007
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

It is perhaps a bit much to expect a current student to tackle the above integral without hints, so here is a a rough walkthrough:









 
Last edited:

Paradoxica

-insert title here-
Joined
Jun 19, 2014
Messages
2,556
Location
Outside reality
Gender
Male
HSC
2016
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

An extension of the previous problem, I guess...

 
Last edited:

Drsoccerball

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 28, 2014
Messages
3,650
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2015
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

Do we actually have to watch out for the domain in integration ?
 

leehuan

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 31, 2014
Messages
5,805
Gender
Male
HSC
2015
Re: MX2 2016 Integration Marathon

I haven't tried it yet.

 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 2)

Top