Old Dog, New Trick

I've been using integration by parts lately to solve some unique problems. Unfortunately, it seems many people don't seem to think there is anything really interesting about it. I would like to show here a simple example of some of its more complicated things I've done with it recently.

First to start off with a quick definition of the integration by parts transformation.



This transformation is kinda useful for numerical integration as well. If you look at the right hand side, you'll see that a always appears integrated. For this reason, we can use this interpretation of the integral whenever the integral of a is better behaved than a itself.  Take this integral as an example:



This equation has no analytic solution and becomes very difficult to analyse numerically around 0. In fact a simple attempt to numerically integrate it won't give good results.

The oscillations are due to that problematic sine term. The amazing thing is how much better behaved the integral of sine(1/x) is than the original expression. The integral has an analytic solution in terms of  the Cosine Integral function: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CosineIntegral.html. This function is not difficult to numerically approximate.

We can then make this integral easier to solve numerically by applying the integration by parts transformation. "a" here will be Sin(1/x) and "b" will be the exponential. First we compute the Integral of a. First I define the integral of the oscillating function:



Here Ci is the previously mentioned CosineIntegral function.  The full transformed integral is:



oI still oscillates, but not as widely as the previous function. This integral is easy to evaluate numerically. If we take out the analytic component and just focus on the integral, we can see we basically just transformed the function in the graph above into an analytically evaluable expression and the integral of this function:

I'm always kind of amazed what kinds of functions this technique can be applied to.