Say that you plot Speed against time, then the area under the curve via integration or sum is distance.
Depending on what you plot the area under the curve means different things in different disciplines depending on what is being measure. Some areas that come to mind: physics, chemistry, finance, probability.
The question is: abstractly what are we achieving? A follow up question is: please provide examples of the where the area under the curve after plotting one variable against another gives us something useful. I'm trying to understand the nature of what we are doing.
Start Free Trial