Abstract
Employing the fundamental techniques of substitution, or change of variables, and integration by parts, the discussion in this paper focuses on obtaining explicit formulas for the integral for and . As the case where r is a non-negative integer is rather simple and obvious, we concentrate mainly on the cases where r is a negative integer or an odd multiple of except when consideration of other cases is appropriate.
Keywords:
binomial integral; Chebyshev theorem; double factorial; explicit formula; initial condition; integral MSC:
26A06; 26C99
1. Preliminary
The traditional analytical approach for evaluating integrals relies on a toolkit of substitution and reduction formulas through integration by parts. The results of such derivations, accumulated and compiled over centuries, resulted in a large number of formulas and are now available in encyclopedic handbooks [1,2], which serve as the authoritative reference for practitioners seeking a specific solution.
In the meantime, the modern algorithmic approach is embodied by symbolic computation packages such as Maple [3] and Mathematica [4], which implement sophisticated procedures, for instance the Risch-Norman algorithm, to find antiderivatives automatically [5]. These packages are highly effective in practice and routinely succeed in integrals for which manual derivation would be prohibitively laborious. Their integration engines typically combine several distinct algorithms and extensive rule tables: however, the internal criteria governing which procedure is invoked for a given integral are generally not exposed to the user [6]. In essence, while immensely powerful, these packages offer limited insight into the analytical relationships between solutions, mathematical structure of the solutions, or a methodology for manual derivation.
The evaluation of definite integrals involving generalized hypergeometric functions [7,8] continues to be an active line of inquiry, as illustrated by a recent study that evaluates a broad class of such integrals by means of generalized Watson-type summation formulas [9]. In modern mathematical physics, related integrals with integer and half-integer parameters are frequently analyzed using harmonic polylogarithms [10] and special-function expansions, particularly in the study of Bessel-type functions [11] and Feynman integrals [12,13]. Another work combines integration-by-parts with differential equations to reduce parametrized families of Feynman integrals to a basis of master integrals, using a projective-geometry formulation in Feynman-parameter space [14]. A related generating-function approach has been used to solve integration-by-parts relations for a family of one-loop integrals indexed jointly by tensor structure and propagator-power distribution [15].
The evaluation of binomial integrals of the form is a classical problem in integral calculus with importance in physics and engineering [16,17]. The theoretical limits of this problem were established by Chebyshev, whose theorem delineates the specific conditions under which these integrals can be expressed in terms of elementary functions [18]. The subclass of the binomial integrals constitutes a classical yet nontrivial problem in integral calculus, particularly when the parameters p and r extend beyond simple non-negative integers. Such cases arise naturally in various applications: for instance, the integral appears in the computation of surface areas of solids of revolution [19]. Some of the formulas in Sects. 2.110 and 2.27 of [2] can be interpreted as special cases of .
Despite the breadth of existing results [1,20], several limitations remain apparent in both pedagogical and research-oriented treatments of the integral . For instance, standard substitution techniques frequently lead to case-by-case calculations, which tend to obscure the underlying analytical structure of the solutions [19]. In addition, reduction formulas obtained through integration by parts often encounter ‘walls’ that interrupt recursive evaluation, requiring problem-dependent initial conditions. Furthermore, although closed-form expressions are available for many individual cases, these results are typically scattered across tables or derived in isolation [1,2] A unification effort has recently been undertaken for another classical family of parametrized integrals, Lobachevsky’s integrals, by combining parameter differentiation, partial fraction decomposition, and series expansion into a single systematic derivation covering all convergent cases [21], underscoring the continuing value of organizing scattered classical results within one coherent analytical framework.
In this paper, we develop a unified analytical and recursive framework for the systematic evaluation of . The approach in this paper is based on a detailed analysis of the parameter plane . We identify five lines , , , , and along which the integral admits direct closed-form evaluation. These cases provide a natural set of initial conditions that anchor the recursive structure of the problem. Building upon these initial conditions, we derive four general recursion formulas that enable the evaluation of at any admissible point in the parameter plane while systematically bypassing the recursion barriers encountered, mostly on the line , in conventional approaches.
The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:
- The parameter plane of is systematically grouped to provide a unified analytical framework for the categorization and derivation of . Five fundamental lines are identified upon which the integral can be evaluated directly to serve as the foundational initial conditions.
- Four recursion formulas are derived that enable the methodical generation of solutions at any admissible point .
- Recursive stability is ensured by systematically bypassing traditional recursion walls with a complete and sufficient set of initial conditions.
- This work culminates in a compendium of explicit, closed-form formulas, serving as a valuable reference.
2. Evaluation of with Basic Techniques
In this paper, our focus will be on obtaining explicit formulas for the primitive function or antiderivative of in the real domain, intervals of x avoiding . Specifically, explicit formulas for
on every point in the set
of admissible points will be derived with the main focus on the cases where r is a negative integer or an odd multiple of . Apparently, among the binomial integrals [16,17]
where and , the integral considered in this paper is a subclass with , , and . It should be noted that (2) implies the existence of in terms of elementary functions by the theorem of Chebyshev [18] because r, , and/or will be an integer for every point in the set .
Throughout the paper, except when necessary, integration constants will be omitted for brevity. From time to time, the terms antiderivative, primitive function, explicit formula, and integral will be used interchangeably with and explicit formula for the integral, which would not incur too much confusion.
2.1. Evaluation via Substitution
With and , we have
and
respectively. In addition, with , we obtain
similar to (5) but more useful, especially when r is an integral multiple of .
2.2. Evaluation via Integration by Parts
When , it is easy to see that or
Next, when , with , , , and , we obtain
Rewriting (10), we have
First, when in (11), we obtain or
for . On the other hand, when , we obtain , which can be expressed as
for and . Although we assumed from the starting point of (10), the result (13) holds for also, producing
for .
Similarly, when , with , , , and , we obtain
If , we easily obtain
for from (15): for , recollect shown in (7).
3. Derivation of Explicit Formulas
In the following developments, and denote the product and sum, respectively, for even when b and c are not integers. To denote ‘’, we use ‘’ especially for the lower limit of a summation. We also let and if . In addition, often implies also. Again, integral constants will be omitted unless they are essential.
3.1. Explicit Formulas for , , , and
We first consider the cases in which direct evaluation of explicit formulas is possible.
Lemma 1.
Theorem 1.
For , as shown in (A7) of Appendix A.1, the explicit formulas for can be expressed as
where , ,
and
denotes the sign of y: note that , not .
Example 3.
With (24), we obtain , for instance.
Theorem 2.
The results (21)–(24) and (27) allow us to obtain the explicit formulas for the integral for every point in the five lines , , , , and , respectively. Figure 1 illustrates the five lines in which every point now has an explicit formula for the integral : three additional lines are also included based on the results later in this section.
Figure 1.
For the three points , , and (in black) and the admissible points in the eight lines , , , , , , , and (in blue), as well as the admissible points in the exceptional recurrence line (in red), explicit formulas for can be found in the equations specified. The explicit formulas are obtained via recursion on the admissible points in the three thinner blue lines , , and : on other points, the explicit formulas are obtained directly. The red point is for use in Example 9 at the end of Section 3.
3.2. Explicit Formulas when
If , we easily obtain as discussed in (9) also. For , we can obtain from or vice versa for with the recursion
which can be derived from (10) or (15).
When using the recursion (28), two initial conditions, known formulas for in this paper, are required because the recursion describes a relationship between two ’s with a difference of 2 in the subscript p and we assume integers for p. In addition, due to the ‘wall’ effect that neither from nor from can be obtained when caused by the factor in the denominator on the right-hand side of (28), one additional initial condition is required.
In short, for the recursion (28), a complete set of three initial conditions would be , of which the first, second, and third elements can be replaced by any element from , , and , respectively.
Now, by adding
obtained from (28), we obtain
for with m a positive integer. It is easy to see that the result (32) can also be used for with m a negative integer after an interchange of the subscripts p and s. Subsequently, the initial conditions from Example 1, from (7), and from (9) can be used to obtain recursively for , for , and for , respectively. These observations will lead us to the following theorem.
Theorem 3.
The explicit formulas for can be obtained via
where
denotes the lower limit of the summation,
denotes the upper limit of the summation,
and
for the points on the line .
Example 4.
We obtain , , , and from (33). We also easily obtain and .
3.3. Explicit Formulas on Other Points of
To obtain from or vice versa at every admissible value except when p is fixed, we can use
shown in (13). Similarly, to obtain from or vice versa at every admissible value except when r is fixed, we can use
shown in (18).
The recursion (38) allows us to obtain from and vice versa in general: however, when and , neither from nor from can be obtained. Based on this observation, we divide the points in into three groups such that , , and , where , , and are called the group sets of r with and . Likewise, when obtaining from and vice versa with (39), we define three group sets of p, , , and , where and .
Clearly, the two recursions (38) and (39) require initial conditions, the known formulas for : for instance, those on the admissible points in the six lines , , , , , and will naturally be the candidates as the initial conditions. Appendix A.7 provides more detailed discussion on the issue of initial conditions.
3.3.1. Derivation of via (38) for Fixed
Let
and
Then, if we add
we obtain
for .
Now, note that , where
with the double factorial defined as
Some values of the double factorial are shown in Table 1 for easy reference.
Table 1.
Some values of .
Theorem 4.
For fixed, from (46) we obtain
useful when calculating from the initial condition for , and
useful when calculating from the initial condition for .
Note that the two formulas (49) and (50) can be used when one of the three group sets , , and contains both r and s. Let us now describe how to obtain the integral for all admissible values of r except for for a fixed value of based on (49) and (50). The procedures differ slightly depending on the value of p. First, when p is an even integer, we use the set of initial conditions , , , . Specifically, use (49) and the initial condition to obtain for ; use (50) and the initial condition to obtain for ; use (49) and the initial condition to obtain for ; and use (50) and the initial condition to obtain for . In effect, among the two sets and , one set is used when obtaining for r odd multiple of and the other set for r even multiple of .
On the other hand, when p is an odd integer, , , , or , , , shall be used as the set of initial conditions, where ℏ denotes any odd multiple of . Specifically, use the initial condition in (49) for obtaining for and the initial condition in (50) for obtaining for : these two steps are the same as those in the case of even p described above. Next, use (49) and the initial condition to obtain for , , and use (50) and the initial condition to obtain for . Subsequently, to obtain for , we may use (49) and the initial condition to obtain in the increasing order of , or use (50) and initial condition to obtain in the decreasing order of . Table 2 summarizes how on all admissible points can be obtained when the value of is fixed.
Table 2.
Evaluation of for all admissible values of r when is fixed.
Example 5.
In Appendix A.3, the result (22) is reconfirmed via the recursions (49) and (50) when .
When , we can obtain , 2, }, , , , , and with the initial conditions , , , and , respectively. Then, after some steps by noting that , we will obtain the following corollary.
Corollary 1.
For , the explicit formulas for can be expressed as
where
denotes the lower limit of the summation, and
denotes the upper limit of the summation.
Example 6.
3.3.2. Derivation of via (39) for Fixed
Theorem 5.
For fixed, the explicit formulas for can be obtained via
and
useful in the calculation of with the initial condition when and , respectively. Here,
Theorem 5 can be proved by following steps similar to those leading to (49) and (50), and details are provided in Appendix A.4. The two formulas (57) and (58) can be used when one of the three group sets , , and contains both r and s. After a discussion similar to that in Section 3.3.1, we will obtain Table 3 as the details on evaluating for a fixed value of .
Table 3.
Evaluation of for all admissible values of p when is fixed.
Corollary 2.
For , the explicit formulas for can be obtained via
where
and
as shown in (A33) of Appendix A.5. Note that in (63).
Example 7.
With (60), we can obtain , , , , , and , for instance. We can also obtain and .
Corollary 3.
Example 8.
From (65), we have when , when , when , and when .
In summary, via the recursions (49), (50), (57), and (58), together with the formulas shown in (21)–(24), (27), (33), (51), (60), and (65), the explicit formulas for all admissible points can be obtained. Table 4 shows some of the explicit formulas for that can be obtained by the formulas derived in Section 2 and Section 3. In the meantime, if we want to obtain the explicit formula on one admissible point, the procedures described below can be adopted more conveniently.
Table 4.
Explicit formulas for . Here, ‘’ denotes ‘equivalent to’,, , and .
Simplified Procedure to Obtain One Explicit Formula
To obtain , follow any of the two ways, W1 and W2.
W1. In the line , choose a value s such that is a non-zero integer and is known.
W1.1 If , obtain from (49) with , , and s the value chosen.
W1.2 If , obtain from (50) with , , and s the value chosen.
W2. In the line , choose a value s such that is a non-zero even integer and is known.
W2.1 If , obtain from (57) with , , and s the value chosen.
W2.2 If , obtain from (58) with , , and s the value chosen.
Example 9.
As an example of the simplified procedure, let us obtain on the red point shown in Figure 1.
(Via W1) In the line , among other possibilities, we can choose for which is available from Table 4. Then, noting that , we follow W1.2. Specifically, using (50) with , , and , we obtain
as shown in Example 2 also. We have used that , , and .
(Via W2) In the line , we can choose for which is available from Example 1. Noting that , we will follow W2.2. Then, using (58) with , , and , we obtain
by noting that , , and .
4. Conclusions
In this paper, we have addressed explicit formulas for the integral , where we have focused on the cases of integers for p and integral multiples of for r. The cases , , , and of the integral have first been obtained by direct calculations. For the remaining cases of the integral, including the special case of , explicit formulas for the integral have been obtained mostly via recursive formulas: for the recursions, the formulas obtained by direct calculations can be employed as the initial conditions. Detailed discussions on the issue of choosing the initial conditions have also been provided in the Appendix A. Some examples of the explicit formulas for the integral are tabulated.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, I.S., S.R.P. and L.A.C.-N.; methodology, I.S., S.R.P. and L.A.C.-N.; software, I.S., S.R.P. and L.A.C.-N. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by an internal grant from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
Data Availability Statement
The source code and the implementation of this study are available publicly in GitHub at https://github.com/varunkaza20/DAVis-Net (accessed on 16 August 2026). These data were derived from the following dataset available in the public domain at Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/nafeesalmahadi/oct2026-retinal-oct2017-balanced-701515-split (accessed on 1 May 2026).
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Appendix A. Derivations of Formulas and Additional Discussions
Appendix A.1. The Case p = −1
First, the case has already been addressed in (23). When , we can use partial fraction expansion based on
where . In addition, the formula
from (5) with is more convenient than (A1) for r an even multiple of , but less convenient for r an odd multiple of .
First, for , we have with from (A2). Thus,
Subsequently, for , we have with , , and from (A2). Thus, letting , we obtain or
When for , using that , we obtain or
from (A1). Subsequently, when for , using (A1) we obtain or
by replacing m and in (A5) with (from we obtain ) and , respectively.
Example A1.
In passing, let us note that a result equivalent to (A7) can be obtained via (14) alternatively. For example, by using (14) recursively and recollecting (9), we have or
for . The term in (A9) can be expressed as : we have used that when the integers j and k satisfy from Table 1.4 in [22] and that from (1.E.22) in [22]. In essence, (A9) is equivalent to the first line on the right-hand side of (A7).
Appendix A.2. The Case r=-1
The cases , , and have been addressed in Example 1. Let us next consider the remaining cases . First, recollect that or
and for . Then, for with , we have or
using (A10). Similarly, when with , we obtain or
with and . Note that, when or , we have .
Secondly, for with , we have or
from (5) with . Similarly, when for , with and , we obtain , which is basically the same as (A13) with x replaced by y. Thus,
Appendix A.3. The Case p=1
When , with and , (49) and (50) can be expressed as or
for , and or
for , respectively. In addition, from and , we can choose the set , , , of initial conditions.
Now, with , , and the initial condition from (21), we obtain or
for from (A17). With , , and the initial condition that can be obtained with (12), we obtain or
for from (A18).
Appendix A.4. Derivation of (uid79) and (uid80)
Appendix A.5. The Case r=-1 2
When , we obtain , , , , and . Let us choose the set , , , of initial conditions.
First, from (57), with , , and shown in Example 1, we obtain or
for and with , , and shown in Example 1, we obtain
for .
Appendix A.6. The Case r=-2
When , we obtain , , , , and . We can choose the initial conditions from Example 4, from (24), from (22), and from Example 6, where we have chosen 0 as ⊙.
Appendix A.7. Initial Conditions for the Recursions (38) and (39)
From Figure 1, it is observed that, for fixed, there now exist five or six explicit formulas for available as the candidates of the initial conditions when using (38). Similarly, when using (39) for fixed, four or five explicit formulas for are available as the candidates for the initial conditions.
Appendix A.7.1. Initial Conditions for the Recursion (38)
To obtain with a fixed value of , we shall employ the recursion (38). For each point with r in one of the three group sets , , and of r, we need two initial conditions because we have assumed integral multiples of for r and the recursion (38) describes a relationship between two ’s with a difference of 1 in the subscript r. In the meantime, an initial condition with r an odd multiple of for one of the three group sets can also be used in another set across a border or when the border is an integer. Likewise, an initial condition with r an integer can be used across a border when the border is an odd multiple of : that is, two of the six initial conditions are redundant, and as a consequence, the number of elements for a complete set of initial conditions is at most four: refer to Appendix A.7.3 for more discussion.
Specifically, we would first choose and . Next, if is an odd multiple of , or equivalently, if p is an even integer, it suffices to choose and because one of and is 0 and the other is an odd multiple of . If is an integer, on the other hand, both and are integers: then, we could choose or as the remaining two initial conditions, where ℏ denotes any odd multiple of as in Table 2. In short, a complete set of initial conditions for the recursion (38) is
In the set , the initial conditions and can be replaced by any element of the sets and , respectively. In addition, when is an integer and an odd multiple of , the initial condition can be replaced by any element of the sets and , respectively. Similarly, the initial condition can be replaced by any element of the sets and when is an integer and an odd multiple of , respectively. Note that .
Appendix A.7.2. Initial Conditions for the Recursion (39)
To obtain with a fixed value of , we shall employ the recursion (39). Following steps similar to those in Appendix A.7.1, a complete set of initial conditions for the recursion (39) is
where ⊙ denotes any even integer as in Table 3.
In the set , the initial conditions and can be replaced by any element of the sets and , respectively. Similarly, the initial condition can be replaced by any element of the sets and when is an even and an odd integer, respectively. Likewise, the initial condition can be replaced by any element of the sets and when is an odd and an even integer, respectively. Note that .
Appendix A.7.3. Special Cases
Let us note that, although in effect contains only three elements because when , it will still be a set of a sufficient number of initial conditions for solving the recursion (38). Similarly, when , the set will still be a complete set for solving the recursion (39) although it contains only three elements because .
Note also that each of the two sets for and for contains only two elements because and , respectively: the number two of initial conditions will be insufficient for solving the recursions. Yet, when and when , the integral does not need to be calculated via recursions but can easily be obtained via direct evaluations as shown in (24) and (27), respectively.
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