Numerical Methods

October 2016
1. To this point, all formulas for numerical integration
have been based in equispaced data points. In
practice, there are many situations where this
assumption does not hold and we must deal with
unequal-sized segments. Experimentally-derived
data is often of this type. For such cases, one method
is to apply the trapezoidal rule to each segment and
sum the results:

h1

f xo f x1

hn
hi

h2

f x1 f x2
2

f xn 1 f xn
2

i.
where is the width of the segment Consider
f x 0.2 25 x 200 x 2 675 x 3 900 x 4 400 x5

f
Determine the integral of
0.8 using:

with limits from 0 to

n 8;

h
a) trapezoidal rule with uniform

for

and

b) Consider the table

x
0

f(x)
0.200000

x
0.44

f(x)
2.842955

0.12

1.309729

0.54

3.507297

0.22

1.305241

0.64

3.181929

0.32

1.743393

0.70

2.363000

0.36

2.074903

0.80

0.232000

0.40

2.456000

Utilize the trapezoidal rule with unequal segments to

evaluate the integral of f with the same limits. Then,
compare this result to the result obtained in (a).
2. Ralston (1962) and Ralston and Rabinowitz (1978)
determine a proportion that provides a minimum
bound on the truncation error for 2 nd order RKM. For
this version,

1
2
yi 1 yi 3 k1 3 k2 h

where

k1 f ti , yi
dy
dx

Evaluate

and
1 2x y

3
3
k2 f ti 4 h, yi 4 h

over the interval from

y 0 1.
x0
to 1 using a step of 0.25 where