what is an integral?

Question

can an one provide a good explanation of what an integral is (and how to use it) for some one without a calculus background ( i have taken trig.)? or is it just to dificult : ( ?

Answer 1

simply put, it is the area under a portion of a curve.

a good example is electric dimmers: The AC voltage wave is a sine curve. A dimmer switch allows only a portion of the voltage to reach the lamp. The dimmer is integrating the sine curve (only allowing a portion of the entire curve to be used). The voltage reaching the lamp can be calculated by integrating the sine curve with respect to a shortened period of time (the time that the dimmer conducts)

Answer 2

Well you are certainly aware of the idea that an area can be broken up into smaller pieces, and so long as these don't overlap, the total area remains the same.

"An integral" is a way of describing very very small and numerous pieces. "Integration" is the process of summing up these pieces. The reason it's useful is that sometimes it's much easier to describe the pieces--for example, as little rectangles of a height determined by the graph of some function above the x-axis--than it is to know the overall volume. So one writes out the integral, and then uses whatever tricks are available to do the summation. "Integral calculus" is a set of principles which explain how such summations can be done.

Answer 3

For me, In integral calculus, the term integral is antiderivative, means the the reverse process of defferential an equation.

Answer 4

Integral f(x) =
w/n * Lim (n-> Infinity)
SUM (s=0 to n-1) f(x+(ws/n))

where f(x) is the differentiable function
w is the width of the interval of
integration
n is the number of subdivisions of w

Answer 5

integral is matematics function.

Answer 6

check this site out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_calculus