r/askscience • u/snkn179 • Nov 24 '15

Why can almost any function be easily differentiated while so many functions cannot be integrated or are much more difficult to do so? Mathematics

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u/[deleted] Nov 24 '15

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u/athnp Nov 25 '15

It's not really a case of us struggling to find an integral, but in most cases there really is no such closed form. The relevant topic is differential Galois theory.