Our Name

In mathematics, a common operation is to form the "integral" of a function, that is to calculate the area under acurve. Usually, this is easy to do (at least in principle). However, occasionally, one finds curves exhibiting a "singularity", that is a value where they "blow up" and become infinite. In such situations, the area under the curve cannot be found by usual means.

In some such situations, however, it can be shown that the infinities cancel, as in the graph above, where the (infinite) orange area on the left seems to cancel with the (infinite) green area to the right - both are infinite, but have different signs, and so one may expect the infinities to cancel each other out, giving rise to a sensible value.

The Principal Value is a way to make this intuition more precise. In a mathematical sense, the Principal Value of an integral is a prescription how to approach the singularity in a controlled fashion, so that the different infinities indeed cancel each other out. The remaining value of the integral is sometimes referred to as its "finite part".

Our Value

This is where we see our value proposition: to extract from the infinity of data the value that is present, but hidden, and to make it accessible for practical use.