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1-Visitor
August 24, 2015
Solved

Integral of sec^2(x)

  • August 24, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 4053 views

Perhaps I am inputting incorrectly but this is what I get

55da60a1bc4da.png

Best answer by lturek

Can't be sure as you don't attach your sheet, but it looks like you have an invisible implicit multiplication operator between "sec" and the parentheses. So your integrands are "sec^2*x" and "sec*x^2", where "sec" is treated as an unknown.

If you fix that it should work as expected:

You  can't use the first notation. While its a quite common and useful shortcut its not perfectly correct to just square the function name and so Mathcad does not accept it. In fact you even should not be able to enter it that way. Its probably from your try to enter it anyway which resulted in separating the function name from the argument and created that implicit multiplication.

If you really need that kind of notation, you could define a custom function for the square of sec but its not that good looking.

LT

2 replies

lturek1-VisitorAnswer
1-Visitor
August 24, 2015

Can't be sure as you don't attach your sheet, but it looks like you have an invisible implicit multiplication operator between "sec" and the parentheses. So your integrands are "sec^2*x" and "sec*x^2", where "sec" is treated as an unknown.

If you fix that it should work as expected:

You  can't use the first notation. While its a quite common and useful shortcut its not perfectly correct to just square the function name and so Mathcad does not accept it. In fact you even should not be able to enter it that way. Its probably from your try to enter it anyway which resulted in separating the function name from the argument and created that implicit multiplication.

If you really need that kind of notation, you could define a custom function for the square of sec but its not that good looking.

LT

1-Visitor
August 24, 2015

Yea it was fine without the brackets - I cant really say why I thought  putting the power outside the parens would cause problems

Thanks again

24-Ruby III
August 24, 2015

Please attach to the message your Mathcad worksheet. What version of Mathcad are you using?