Antiderivatives & Basic Rules

Single-variable calculus from first principles

An antiderivative of f is a function whose derivative is f; you're running differentiation in reverse. The FTC says this is exactly what you need to evaluate integrals, so being fluent at "un-differentiating" is the key skill of integration.

To differentiate xⁿ you dropped the exponent by one and multiplied by it. To antidifferentiate, do the opposite: raise the exponent by one and divide by the new exponent:

An antiderivative is an 'undo' button. Someone hands you a slope — a derivative — and asks which function it came from, so you reverse the gesture that produced it. Differentiating took a function and reported its slope; antidifferentiating presses undo and hands the original function back (give or take a constant the undo can't see).

Where this lives in MLAntiderivatives turn an accumulated quantity back into a closed form. In probability, recovering a cumulative distribution from a density, or a normalising constant from an unnormalised density, is antidifferentiation/integration. The +C corresponds to a baseline you fix with a boundary condition, much like an integration constant gets pinned down by requiring a probability to integrate to 1.
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