Sunday Function | ScienceBlogs
We've done a lot of discussion of the concept of integrals of a function here on this blog. Their definitions and applications are so broad as to defy any one-sentence description, but one of the most basic is the idea of the area under a curve. More precisely it's the signed area under the curve - that is, the area above the x-axis is counted as positive and the area under counts as negative. Stealing the image from Wikipedia, which communicates the concept well: