ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Integration by reduction formulae

Integration by reduction formulae is a way to find an area or size of something. For example, let's say you're trying to figure out how much paint you need to buy to paint your bedroom. The walls of your bedroom are all different sizes, and so we need to figure out how to add up the size of all the walls together.

To do this, we can use integration by reduction formulae. This is a way of adding up little pieces of something until the total size is figured out.

Let's pretend our bedroom has four walls, a short wall (1 foot long), a medium wall (2 feet long), a tall wall (3 feet long), and a very tall wall (4 feet long). To figure out how much paint we need for all four walls, we use integration by reduction formulae.

We start by taking the size of the smallest wall, the 1-foot wall, and adding it to the size of the next larger wall. So, 1 foot + 2 feet = 3 feet. Then, we take that 3 feet figure and add it to the size of the next bigger wall, which is the 3-foot wall. 3 feet + 3 feet = 6 feet. We do this again and add 6 feet + 4 feet and get 10 feet, which is the total size of all four walls.

So, to paint all four walls of our bedroom, we will need paint to cover 10 feet of wall space.