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For example, they are used to form polynomial equations, which encode a wide range of problems, from elementary word problems to complicated scientific problems; they are used to define polynomial functions, which appear in settings ranging from basic chemistry and physics to economics and social science; and they are used in calculus and ...
In mathematics, a quadratic function of a single variable is a function of the form [1] = + +,,where is its variable, and , , and are coefficients.The expression + + , especially when treated as an object in itself rather than as a function, is a quadratic polynomial, a polynomial of degree two.
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.
For example, a quadratic for the numerator and a cubic for the denominator is identified as a quadratic/cubic rational function. The rational function model is a generalization of the polynomial model: rational function models contain polynomial models as a subset (i.e., the case when the denominator is a constant).
Polynomial curves fitting points generated with a sine function. The black dotted line is the "true" data, the red line is a first degree polynomial, the green line is second degree, the orange line is third degree and the blue line is fourth degree. The first degree polynomial equation = + is a line with slope a. A line will connect any two ...
For polynomials in two or more variables, the degree of a term is the sum of the exponents of the variables in the term; the degree (sometimes called the total degree) of the polynomial is again the maximum of the degrees of all terms in the polynomial. For example, the polynomial x 2 y 2 + 3x 3 + 4y has degree 4, the same degree as the term x ...
The resulting polynomial is not a linear function of the coordinates (its degree can be higher than 1), but it is a linear function of the fitted data values. The determinant , permanent and other immanants of a matrix are homogeneous multilinear polynomials in the elements of the matrix (and also multilinear forms in the rows or columns).
The quadratic formula =. is a closed form of the solutions to the general quadratic equation + + =. More generally, in the context of polynomial equations, a closed form of a solution is a solution in radicals; that is, a closed-form expression for which the allowed functions are only n th-roots and field operations (+,,, /).