The closed, positively oriented graph starts from and ends at (2,0). is displayed below:
Let
What is ?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
This was a fun problem. The curl of the vector field is equal to y . By Stoke's Theorem, we can calculate the line integral by double-integrating the curl over the enclosed area. Integrate the right side and double the result (that is where the 2 outside comes from).
2 ∫ 1 . 2 5 x − 2 . 5 1 − ( x − 1 ) 2 ∫ 0 2 y d x d y = − 6 1 7 ≈ − 2 . 8 3 3
Just for fun, I also wrote some code to evaluate the line integral directly, by integrating the dot product of the vector field and the infinitesimal path displacement vector. While tracing the path, I had to avoid the interface points between the curve segments, since the argument of the natural log is zero at those points. The code results (printed at the bottom) agree with the double integral, as expected.