The worlds of science and mathematics were sent into turmoil yesterday, with the shock revelation that Integration had been made up by science over a century ago.

“I never meant any harm”, confessed the abstract concept of science, which spontaneously materialised to call a press conference. “You have to understand the level of competition back then, the types of pressure I was under. Differentiation was a huge success, and all eyes were on me to come up with another mathematical hit.”

“Sure, it started off easy enough”, Science continued, adjusting its extremely thick glasses, “I just thought `Let’s do differentiation backwards!`. For a couple of weeks everything was fine, we just reversed the rules we had, but then things started to get ugly. Subsitutions, patchwork rearrangements ??? I thought for sure people would catch on when we brought out integration by parts, but they just took it!”

After that the downhill slide was quick. “Once we realised that people weren’t checking this stuff, we stopped caring. We made huge tables of integrals knowing people would just take our word for it. Towards the end, whenever we were stuck we’d just set it equal to pi. Or square root of pi, that was a good one!”

“I’m really very sorry,” concluded Science, “I only hope I can make it up to all those who have been hurt by integration over the years.”