Thread: Help with integration

Ok, so I have a general question about integrals that I hope someone can help me understand through a specific question. One of the problems that I am working on is to evaluate the following integral:



where q>0.

The problem asks me to evalaute the integral for two cases: (1) when 0 is less than or equal to r is less than or equal to a and (2) when r > a. I just get that the integral's solution is q/r. How will the relative sizes of r and a be important? Thanks!

Not sure about the inequalities, since evaluating the integral with the constants a and r, will be the same in both cases, since we need not know their values to manipulate them algebraically. Also I got the integral to be q/2r.