Scientists of Reddit: what is the most difficult integral you’ve ever personally computed?

r/

We’ll put this into two camps: A) analytically solving the integral, which obviously is going to be a lot smaller and simpler of a category but possibly the more interesting, or B) integrals you calculated by numerical methods.

There are some very famous integrals in both camps that I expect in the responses, but I am curious if y’all’ve used any of the more obscure / niche but still very difficult ones. Which ones stick out to you in your memory?

Comments

  1. AsILayTyping Avatar

    You mean formatting the integral correctly so Wolfram Alpha or Mathcad solves it?

  2. Sad_Communication970 Avatar

    As someone with a phd in mathematics that still does research on algebraic topology I’d go with the integral of a polynomial I guess.

  3. laziestindian Avatar

    Well I’m a biologist so the last integral I did anything with was in college physics probably something to do with magnets and vectors. It was over a decade ago lol.

  4. dukesdj Avatar

    I am in B category and an applied mathematician. The fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations. These equations are integrated in time to solve for the field and flow.

  5. forever_erratic Avatar

    I spent a bunch of time using numerical methods to solve ecology ODEs and PDEs, which often required a lot of hand- holding. So those.