Synthetic Divison by a Quadratic

I was sitting in a school improvement meeting paying less attention than I ought to, and started trying to figure out how to figure out the topic above. What is below is my way.. I tried to find something about this on the internet, but only found sites that deal with linear factors, and some of them said that what I have done was not possible (I hope they are wrong)... Then when I came home I found a post on the AP Calculus Discussion site that asked how to do this very thing, with a citation for an article in the Mathematics Teacher, (March, 1980 journal (hopefully the archives go back that far), there is an article called "Synthetic Division for Nonlinear Factors" ...thanks to Lisa Lewis) that describes the process. Unfortunatly I can't get that on-line.

So here is how I did it.. I made up a problem involving a fourth power polynomial, and a quadratic divisor(A clever student could break this divsor into two linear terms and do the same in two divisions... IF he is careful about remainders, but pretend I had been clever enough to use a irreducible quadratic for the divisor)


Divide x⁴ + 8x³+ 15x² + 4x + 1 by x² + 3x + 2, using synthetic division:

The dividend is written out in the usual order with the coefficients (including any missing zeros)... and to the left two columns with the negative of the B term (3 and the C term (2) as shown below... notice that I use the -B term above the -C term.. and as usual, the bottom row will be the quotient.
The first step is still to bring down the leading coefficient.. from there there are two multiplications: the product of the -B term and the number in the bottom row go in the row with -B and the column with the last bottom number... The product of the -C term and the last bottom number will go in the column one to the right of the last bottom number. Note the locations of the -3 under the 8, and the -2 under the 15...Then we add up all the values in the second row to get a new bottom value.

We continue this process, always keeping the product of the -C term entered one to the right of the last bottom number.



Since we are dividing a fourth degree polynomial by a second degree polynomial, the answer will be of the second degree, and the last two cells on the bottom represent a linear remainder. In this case the quotient is x² + 5x -2 and the remainder is 0x + 5... You can check the solution by multiplication.

Big Idea..... Gauss proved that all polynomials with real valued coefficients can be factored into a product of linear factors (like x-a) and irreducible quadratic factors (qudratics that don't have real roots, and hence can't be factored over the reals). So we can factor any real valued polynomial with nothing bigger than quadratic division....

But what if we have a seventh power polynomial and want to divide it by a cubic and we don't want to do it without breaking the cubic down... can it be done...?

OK, I don't know, but if I get a free moment in the next 24 hours, I think I will try extending this method to a third term and see if I get lucky...

Ok, so the remark about "breaking the cubic down" was not clear, so I will try to cover that in a day or two..... HEY, I have five classes to prep..give a guy a break...

**** This blog has been expanded to include this method and some other little known uses of synthetic division.  

Synthetic Division, Beyond the Basics