Math Is Fun Forum

Daniel123

Member

Registered: 2007-05-23

Posts: 663

Quartic Formula

http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/QuarticFormula.html

I feel almost as bad for the person who typed it up in LaTeX as the person who worked it out.

Last edited by Daniel123 (2009-02-25 12:25:09)

Ricky

Moderator

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 3,791

Re: Quartic Formula

At the bottom:

The formulas for the roots are much too unwieldy to be used for solving quartic equations by radicals, even with the help of a computer.

I don't buy that.  Sure, it might be hard to just type them in to a program without errors, and certainly there are more efficient ways.  But too unwieldy?  Unless you're solving hundreds of thousands of quartic polynomials, I see no reason why the formula would be "unwieldy".

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"In the real world, this would be a problem.  But in mathematics, we can just define a place where this problem doesn't exist.  So we'll go ahead and do that now..."

mathsyperson

Moderator

Registered: 2005-06-22

Posts: 4,900

Re: Quartic Formula

I feel almost as bad for the person who typed it up in LaTeX as the person who worked it out.

At least they only had to type out the formula for one of the roots.
The roots all appear to be of the form p ± q ± r.
Still a hefty amount of work though. Anyone want to check it's right?

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Why did the vector cross the road?
It wanted to be normal.