Editing Newton–Cotes formulas (section)

== Composite rules ==
For the Newton–Cotes rules to be accurate, the step size {{mvar|h}} needs to be small, which means that the interval of integration <math>[a, b]</math> must be small itself, which is not true most of the time. For this reason, one usually performs numerical integration by splitting <math>[a, b]</math> into smaller subintervals, applying a Newton–Cotes rule on each subinterval, and adding up the results. This is called a ''composite rule''. See [[Numerical integration]].