Quick Update

I’ve spend most of this week sitting in a car, so while I have been able to do some work, I haven’t had much time to write up a blog post. So, to comply with Ondrej’s rule, here is a quick update.

I have been working my way through Bronstein’s book. I finished the outer algorithmic layer of the implantation. Basically, the algorithm does polynomials manipulation on the integrand. It first reduces the integrand into smaller integrals, until it gets to an integral where a subproblem must be solved to solve it. The subproblem that must be solved differs depending on the type of the integral. The first one that comes up in Bronstein’s text is the Risch Differential Equation, which arises from the integration of exponential functions. (I will explain all of these thing in more detail in a future blog post). At this point, the algorithms begin to recursively depend on each other, requiring me to implement more and more algorithms at a time in order for each to work. To make things worse, a very fundamental set of algorithms are only described in the text, not given in pseudo-code, so I have had to figure those things out. These are algorithms to determine if a differential extension is a derivative or logarithmic derivative of elements that have already been extended. Again, I will explain better in a future post, but the idea is that you replace elements in an integrand with dummy variables, but each element has to be transcendental over the previous elements. So if you have , and you set and ( and ), then you cannot make because . The ability to determine if an element is a derivative or a logarithmic derivative of an element of the already build differential extension is important not only for building up the extension for the integrand (basically the preparsing), but also for solving some of the cases of the subproblems such as the Risch Differential Equation problem.

So I am still figuring out some of the details on that one. The description in the book is pretty good (this is probably the best written math textbook I have ever seen), but I still have had to figure out some of the mathematical details on paper (which is something I enjoy anyway, but it can be more stressful). Hopefully by the next time I can have some code that is working enough to actually demonstrate solving some complex integrals, (with manual preparsing), and even more excitingly, prove that some non-elementary integrals, such as the classic , are indeed so. And I also hope to have some more explanations on how the Risch algorithm works in future posts.