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Wyatt Kieffner
College of Mathematics and Natural Sciences,
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst,
MA,
01003
wkieffner@umass.edu
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Chapter 1
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Obviously, for a curve with a positive slope, this is an underestimation
of the true area under the curve, as we are missing the area highlighted in
yellow in Figure 1.1 between each rectangle and the curve. This summation
would overestimate a curve with a negative slope and be perfectly accurate
for an entirely flat curve. Lets look at a Riemann sum where we set the
upper right endpoints of the rectangles to lie on the curve rather than the
left.
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Figure 1.3: Increasing the number of rectangles
Created by Wyatt Kieffner
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Notice that we only included the expression for a lefthand sum. This is
because, as we would want, the values of the lefthand sum and righthand
sum approach the same figure (the actual area under the curve) when n
approaches infinity. We then define the definite integral as follows.
n
Z b
baX
f (x)dx = lim f (xi1 ) (1.3)
a n n i=1