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To complete the square, form a squared binomial on the left-hand side of a quadratic equation, from which the solution can be found by taking the square root of both sides. The standard way to derive the quadratic formula is to apply the method of completing the square to the generic quadratic equation a x 2 + b x + c = 0 {\displaystyle ...
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 quadratic equation on a number can be solved using the well-known quadratic formula, which can be derived by completing the square. That formula always gives the roots of the quadratic equation, but the solutions are expressed in a form that often involves a quadratic irrational number, which is an algebraic fraction that can be evaluated ...
Completing the square is the oldest method of solving general quadratic equations, used in Old Babylonian clay tablets dating from 1800–1600 BCE, and is still taught in elementary algebra courses today.
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.
In particular, the two solutions of a quadratic equation are conjugate, as per the in the quadratic formula =. Complex conjugation is the special case where the square root is i = − 1 , {\displaystyle i={\sqrt {-1}},} the imaginary unit .
The square root of a positive integer is the product of the roots of its prime factors, because the square root of a product is the product of the square roots of the factors. Since p 2 k = p k , {\textstyle {\sqrt {p^{2k}}}=p^{k},} only roots of those primes having an odd power in the factorization are necessary.
In particular √ D belongs to [], being a root of the equation x 2 − D = 0, which has 4D as its discriminant. The square root of any integer is a quadratic integer, as every integer can be written n = m 2 D, where D is a square-free integer, and its square root is a root of x 2 − m 2 D = 0.