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A solution in radicals or algebraic solution is an expression of a solution of a polynomial equation that is algebraic, that is, relies only on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to integer powers, and extraction of n th roots (square roots, cube roots, etc.). A well-known example is the quadratic formula
In the case of two nested square roots, the following theorem completely solves the problem of denesting. [2]If a and c are rational numbers and c is not the square of a rational number, there are two rational numbers x and y such that + = if and only if is the square of a rational number d.
Figure 1. Plots of quadratic function y = ax 2 + bx + c, varying each coefficient separately while the other coefficients are fixed (at values a = 1, b = 0, c = 0). A quadratic equation whose coefficients are real numbers can have either zero, one, or two distinct real-valued solutions, also called roots.
The roots of the quadratic function y = 1 / 2 x 2 − 3x + 5 / 2 are the places where the graph intersects the x-axis, the values x = 1 and x = 5. They can be found via the quadratic formula. In elementary algebra, the quadratic formula is a closed-form expression describing the solutions of a quadratic equation.
A method analogous to piece-wise linear approximation but using only arithmetic instead of algebraic equations, uses the multiplication tables in reverse: the square root of a number between 1 and 100 is between 1 and 10, so if we know 25 is a perfect square (5 × 5), and 36 is a perfect square (6 × 6), then the square root of a number greater than or equal to 25 but less than 36, begins with ...
An illustration of Newton's method. In numerical analysis, the Newton–Raphson method, also known simply as Newton's method, named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a root-finding algorithm which produces successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function.
Denoting the two roots by r 1 and r 2 we distinguish three cases. If the discriminant is zero the fraction converges to the single root of multiplicity two. If the discriminant is not zero, and |r 1 | ≠ |r 2 |, the continued fraction converges to the root of maximum modulus (i.e., to the root with the greater absolute value).
If only one root, say r 1, is real, then r 2 and r 3 are complex conjugates, which implies that r 2 – r 3 is a purely imaginary number, and thus that (r 2 – r 3) 2 is real and negative. On the other hand, r 1 – r 2 and r 1 – r 3 are complex conjugates, and their product is real and positive. [23]