How I Impressed My Wife: Index

Some husbands try to impress their wives by lifting extremely heavy objects or other extraordinary feats of physical prowess.

That will never happen in the Quintanilla household in a million years.

But she was impressed that I broke an impasse in her research and resolved a discrepancy between Mathematica 4 and Mathematica 8 by finding the following integral by hand in less than an hour:

$\displaystyle \int_0^{2\pi} \frac{dx}{\cos^2 x + 2 a \sin x \cos x + (a^2 + b^2) \sin^2 x}$

Yes, I married well indeed.

In this post, I collect the posts that I wrote last summer regarding various ways of computing this integral.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2a, 2b, 2c, 2d, 2e, 2f: Changing the endpoints of integration, multiplying top and bottom by $\sec^2 x$ , and the substitution $u = \tan x$ .

Part 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 3e, 3f, 3g, 3h, 3i: Double-angle trig identity, combination into a single trig function, changing the endpoints of integration, and the magic substitution $u = \tan \theta/2$ .

Part 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h: Double-angle trig identity, combination into a single trig function, changing the endpoints of integration, and contour integration using the unit circle

Part 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5g, 5h, 5i, 5j: Independence of the parameter $a$ , the magic substitution $u = \tan \theta/2$ , and partial fractions.

Part 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d, 6e, 6f, 6g:Independence of the parameter $a$ , the magic substitution $u = \tan \theta/2$ , and contour integration using the real line and an expanding semicircle.

Part 7: Concluding thoughts… and ways that should work that I haven’t completely figured out yet.

How I Impressed My Wife: Index

Published by John Quintanilla

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Published by John Quintanilla

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