AS/A2 Pure 5 Pure 6

P4 Topic 5: First Order Differential Equations
The integrating factor
First order differential equations of this form:.
where P and Q are functions of x only, can be solved by use of an integrating factor, I where:
By using the integrating factor, the differential equation can be changed into an exact differential equation. This is a differential equation where the main part of it is the exact derivative of a product, and the rest is easy to integrate.

Summary Note that before you use this method, you must change the differential equation into the form and work with this version from then on. This page uses HotEqn.