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Concept
Partial fraction decomposition
Summary
In algebra, the partial fraction decomposition or partial fraction expansion of a rational fraction (that is, a fraction such that the numerator and the denominator are both polynomials) is an operation that consists of expressing the fraction as a sum of a polynomial (possibly zero) and one or several fractions with a simpler denominator.
The importance of the partial fraction decomposition lies in the fact that it provides algorithms for various computations with rational functions, including the explicit computation of antiderivatives, Taylor series expansions, inverse Z-transforms, and inverse Laplace transforms. The concept was discovered independently in 1702 by both Johann Bernoulli and Gottfried Leibniz.
In symbols, the partial fraction decomposition of a rational fraction of the form where f and g are polynomials, is its expression as
where
p(x) is a polynomial, and, for each j,
the denominator gj (x) is a power of an irreducible polynomial (that is not factorable into polynomials of positive degrees), and
the numerator fj (x) is a polynomial of a smaller degree than the degree of this irreducible polynomial.
When explicit computation is involved, a coarser decomposition is often preferred, which consists of replacing "irreducible polynomial" by "square-free polynomial" in the description of the outcome. This allows replacing polynomial factorization by the much easier-to-compute square-free factorization. This is sufficient for most applications, and avoids introducing irrational coefficients when the coefficients of the input polynomials are integers or rational numbers.
Let
be a rational fraction, where F and G are univariate polynomials in the indeterminate x over a field. The existence of the partial fraction can be proved by applying inductively the following reduction steps.
There exist two polynomials E and F_1 such that
and
where denotes the degree of the polynomial P.
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