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The other roots of the equation are obtained either by changing of cube root or, equivalently, by multiplying the cube root by a primitive cube root of unity, that is . This formula for the roots is always correct except when p = q = 0 , with the proviso that if p = 0 , the square root is chosen so that C ≠ 0 .
The graph of any cubic function is similar to such a curve. The graph of a cubic function is a cubic curve, though many cubic curves are not graphs of functions. Although cubic functions depend on four parameters, their graph can have only very few shapes. In fact, the graph of a cubic function is always similar to the graph of a function of ...
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.
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 square root of a univariate quadratic function gives rise to one of the four conic sections, almost always either to an ellipse or to a hyperbola. If a > 0 , {\displaystyle a>0,} then the equation y = ± a x 2 + b x + c {\displaystyle y=\pm {\sqrt {ax^{2}+bx+c}}} describes a hyperbola, as can be seen by squaring both sides.
Geometrically, the discriminant of a quadratic form in three variables is the equation of a quadratic projective curve. The discriminant is zero if and only if the curve is decomposed in lines (possibly over an algebraically closed extension of the field). A quadratic form in four variables is the equation of a projective surface.
This equation is called the canonical form of a hyperbola, because any hyperbola, regardless of its orientation relative to the Cartesian axes and regardless of the location of its center, can be transformed to this form by a change of variables, giving a hyperbola that is congruent to the original (see below).
Watt's curve, which arose in the context of early work on the steam engine, is a sextic in two variables.. One method of solving the cubic equation involves transforming variables to obtain a sextic equation having terms only of degrees 6, 3, and 0, which can be solved as a quadratic equation in the cube of the variable.