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In Germany there's a proverb: "Differenzieren ist Handwerk, Integrieren ist Kunst" - differentiation is craft, integration is an art.


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Best exemplified by x^x. Differentiation is tricky but doable. Integration is impossible.

Depends on your definition of "impossible" ;-)

In high school, I transformed x^x into e^(x log x), expanded that into the Taylor series, and integrated term by term. I got a "solution", but it wasn't closed form - it was an infinite series. And, for a given error limit, it probably converged more slowly than a decent numerical integration. So, not worth much. But I "solved" it...


In English too. I remember my high school calc teacher saying this (except IIRC it was differentiation is science, not craft).

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2117/

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