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I'm going to drop the lowest of your three midterms. That's not an excuse to blow this one off, but rather an opportunity to improve on your test average.
The test will cover from 3.3 through and including 4.2.
where $F(x)$ is any particular anti-derivative.
represent?
That's the general idea, but for a specific example. If we let
and
then we can generalize this:
So, in terms of a definite integral, the rule is that
$\frac{du}{dx}=g'(x)$ or $du=g'(x)dx$,
so
Forgetting for a moment that we might know how to solve this!;), we can always do the change of variables
and hope that the integral on the right is easier to solve (certainly less cluttered). Notice especially the change in the limits on the integral.
Writing it in this last way may be mysterious, because of the change of variable to u (and the change in the limits); but it's the disappearance of g'(x) that's really curious. It falls right out of the change of variables, however:
The trick generally is to recognize the presence of a "chain-rule derivative" in the integrand -- that is a product that one can think of as $h'(g(x))g'(x)$.
Let's do some examples!