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,Horowitz, Ellis. "Algorithms for partial fraction decomposition and rational function integration." Proceedings of the second ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic manipulation. ACM, 1971. 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 and are polynomials, is the expression of the rational fraction as
where is a polynomial, and, for each , the denominator is a power of an irreducible polynomial (i.e. not factorizable into polynomials of positive degrees), and the numerator 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.
Basic principles
Let
be a rational fraction, where and are univariate polynomials in the indeterminate over a field. The existence of the partial fraction decomposition can be proved by applying inductively the following reduction steps.
Polynomial part There exist two polynomials and such that
and
where denotes the degree of the polynomial .
This results immediately from the Euclidean division of by , which asserts the existence of and such that and
This allows supposing in the next steps that
Factors of the denominator If and
where and are coprime polynomials, then there exist polynomials and such that
and
This can be proved as follows. Bézout's identity asserts the existence of polynomials and such that
(by hypothesis, is a greatest common divisor of and ).
Let with be the Euclidean division of by Setting one gets
It remains to show that By reducing the last sum of fractions to a common denominator, one gets
and thus
Powers in the denominator Using the preceding decomposition inductively one gets fractions of the form with where is an irreducible polynomial. If , one can decompose further, by using that an irreducible polynomial is a square-free polynomial, that is, is a greatest common divisor of the polynomial and its derivative. If is the derivative of , Bézout's identity provides polynomials and such that and thus Euclidean division of by gives polynomials and such that and Setting one gets
with
Iterating this process with in place of leads eventually to the following theorem.
Statement
The uniqueness can be proved as follows. Let . All together, and the have coefficients. The shape of the decomposition defines a linear map from coefficient vectors to polynomials of degree less than . The existence proof means that this map is surjective. As the two vector spaces have the same dimension, the map is also injective, which means uniqueness of the decomposition. By the way, this proof induces an algorithm for computing the decomposition through linear algebra.
If is the field of complex numbers, the fundamental theorem of algebra implies that all have degree one, and all numerators are constants. When is the field of real numbers, some of the may be quadratic, so, in the partial fraction decomposition, quotients of linear polynomials by powers of quadratic polynomials may also occur.
In the preceding theorem, one may replace "distinct irreducible polynomials" by "pairwise coprime polynomials that are coprime with their derivative". For example, the may be the factors of the square-free factorization of . When is the field of rational numbers, as it is typically the case in computer algebra, this allows to replace factorization by greatest common divisor computation for computing a partial fraction decomposition.
Application to symbolic integration
For the purpose of symbolic integration, the preceding result may be refined into
This reduces the computation of the antiderivative of a rational function to the integration of the last sum, which is called the logarithmic part, because its antiderivative is a linear combination of logarithms.
There are various methods to compute decomposition in the Theorem. One simple way is called Hermite's method. First, b is immediately computed by Euclidean division of f by g, reducing to the case where deg(f) < deg(g). Next, one knows deg(cij) < deg(pi), so one may write each cij as a polynomial with unknown coefficients. Reducing the sum of fractions in the Theorem to a common denominator, and equating the coefficients of each power of x in the two numerators, one gets a system of linear equations which can be solved to obtain the desired (unique) values for the unknown coefficients.
Procedure
Given two polynomials and , where the αn are distinct constants and , explicit expressions for partial fractions can be obtained by supposing that
and solving for the ci constants, by substitution, by equating the coefficients of terms involving the powers of x, or otherwise. (This is a variant of the method of undetermined coefficients. After both sides of the equation are multiplied by Q(x), one side of the equation is a specific polynomial, and the other side is a polynomial with undetermined coefficients. The equality is possible only when the coefficients of like powers of x are equal. This yields n equations in n unknowns, the ck.)
A more direct computation, which is strongly related to Lagrange interpolation, consists of writing
where is the derivative of the polynomial . The coefficients of are called the residues of f/g.
This approach does not account for several other cases, but can be modified accordingly:
If then it is necessary to perform the Euclidean division of P by Q, using polynomial long division, giving with . Dividing by Q(x) this gives and then seek partial fractions for the remainder fraction (which by definition satisfies ). If Q(x) contains nonlinear factors which are irreducible over the given field, then the numerator N(x) of each partial fraction with such a factor F(x) in the denominator must be sought as a polynomial with , rather than as a constant. For example, take the following decomposition over R: Suppose and , that is is a root of of multiplicity . In the partial fraction decomposition, the first powers of will occur as denominators of the partial fractions (possibly with a zero numerator). For example, if the partial fraction decomposition has the form
Illustration
In an example application of this procedure, can be decomposed in the form
Clearing denominators shows that . Expanding and equating the coefficients of powers of gives
Solving this system of linear equations for and yields . Hence,
Residue method
Over the complex numbers, suppose f(x) is a rational proper fraction, and can be decomposed into
Let
then according to the uniqueness of Laurent series, aij is the coefficient of the term in the Laurent expansion of gij(x) about the point xi, i.e., its residue
This is given directly by the formula
or in the special case when xi is a simple root,
when
Over the reals
Partial fractions are used in real-variable integral calculus to find real-valued antiderivatives of rational functions. Partial fraction decomposition of real rational functions is also used to find their Inverse Laplace transforms. For applications of partial fraction decomposition over the reals, see
Application to symbolic integration, above Partial fractions in Laplace transforms
General result
Let be any rational function over the real numbers. In other words, suppose there exist real polynomials functions and , such that
By dividing both the numerator and the denominator by the leading coefficient of , we may assume without loss of generality that is monic. By the fundamental theorem of algebra, we can write
where , , are real numbers with , and , are positive integers. The terms are the linear factors of which correspond to real roots of , and the terms are the irreducible quadratic factors of which correspond to pairs of complex conjugate roots of .
Then the partial fraction decomposition of is the following:
Here, P(x) is a (possibly zero) polynomial, and the Air, Bir, and Cir are real constants. There are a number of ways the constants can be found.
The most straightforward method is to multiply through by the common denominator q(x). We then obtain an equation of polynomials whose left-hand side is simply p(x) and whose right-hand side has coefficients which are linear expressions of the constants Air, Bir, and Cir. Since two polynomials are equal if and only if their corresponding coefficients are equal, we can equate the coefficients of like terms. In this way, a system of linear equations is obtained which always has a unique solution. This solution can be found using any of the standard methods of linear algebra. It can also be found with limits (see Example 5).
Examples
Example 1
Here, the denominator splits into two distinct linear factors:
so we have the partial fraction decomposition
Multiplying through by the denominator on the left-hand side gives us the polynomial identity
Substituting x = −3 into this equation gives A = −1/4, and substituting x = 1 gives B = 1/4, so that
Example 2
After long division, we have
The factor is irreducible over the reals, as its discriminant is negative. Thus the partial fraction decomposition over the reals has the shape
Multiplying through by , we have the polynomial identity
Taking , we see that , so . Comparing the x2 coefficients, we see that , so . Comparing linear coefficients, we see that , so . Altogether,
The fraction can be completely decomposed using complex numbers. According to the fundamental theorem of algebra every complex polynomial of degree n has n (complex) roots (some of which can be repeated). The second fraction can be decomposed to:
Multiplying through by the denominator gives:
Equating the coefficients of and the constant (with respect to ) coefficients of both sides of this equation, one gets a system of two linear equations in and , whose solution is
Thus we have a complete decomposition:
One may also compute directly and with the residue method (see also example 4 below).
Example 3
This example illustrates almost all the "tricks" we might need to use, short of consulting a computer algebra system.
After long division and factoring the denominator, we have
The partial fraction decomposition takes the form
Multiplying through by the denominator on the left-hand side we have the polynomial identity
Now we use different values of x to compute the coefficients:
Solving this we have:
Using these values we can write:
We compare the coefficients of x6 and x5 on both side and we have:
Therefore:
which gives us B = 0. Thus the partial fraction decomposition is given by: