Talk:Symbolic integration

A lot of the information in this article is covered in antiderivative. I think it should either be merged or atleast cleaned up, as the current article is not in formal encyclopedic tone and has some grammatical errors. RyanC. 08:33, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with the merge. This article is on symbolic integration in the field of computers, not the general mathematical question of fionding an asntiderivative. RJFJR 17:10, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I removed the expand and clean-up tags. The article looks good to me in it's current form. The deletion of the lengthy paragraph was a good move in my opinion; that information is covered in antiderivative. RyanC. 05:43, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Moved from article space

 * (We say usually because, while the lion's share of functions of a single variable can be broken down into combinations of approximately twenty standard forms, there are functions with non-numeric exponents--x to the x power, say--that must be attacked via the implicit differentiation approach that is not necessarily straightforward to perform by digital computer.)

This is too long and detailed. Just say usually. RJFJR 17:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Disparity in coverage
At the moment, the coverage of symbolic integration in Integral is more extensive, even though that article designates Symbolic integration as the 'main article' and links here. Arcfrk 17:14, 28 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, for some reason this article covers only finding an antiderivative. Symbolic integration also covers definite integration, which may or may not involve finding an antiderivative. 140.177.205.222 (talk) 17:58, 17 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Hello. This situation has not evolved a bit.  This article now includes material for definite integrals i.e. solutions based on special functions.TonyMath (talk) 21:05, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Vandalization of credit for symbolic integration based on special functions
Twice I have witnessed people claim this method of symbolic integration was pioneered by computer algebra systems other than Maple. Developers of the Maple system showed the method at a high profile conference at MIT as indicated in the reference. Anyone claiming that this method was invented by another system should provide proof with an earlier reference. TonyMath (talk) 23:14, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
 * "Vandalization" is not an acceptable term. This being said, I apologize for a confusion between definite and indefinite integration. This confusion was probably caused by the fact that the paragraph devoted to Risch was too short for a due weight, although it was mentioned twice in the paragraph on definite integration. I hope I have correctly corrected all of this by my recent edit. D.Lazard (talk) 10:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I am satisfied with the most recent version and hope all is clarified for everyone. The method of symbolic integration based on the exploitation of special functions has nothing to do with the Risch algorithm, though I have pondered about a hybrid algorithm.TonyMath (talk) 04:48, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Should SAINT(Symbolic Automatic INTegrator) program be mentioned here?
The SAINT(Symbolic Automatic INTegrator) program developed by James Slagle and Marvin Minsky was the first expert system that is a heuristic program for solving symbolic integration problems. Is it relevant to mention it as part of the history of symbolic integration in computer science? Alacris (talk) 14:45, 20 November 2023 (UTC)