The Wolfram|Alpha Blog is now part of the Wolfram Blog. Join us there for the latest on Wolfram|Alpha and other Wolfram offerings »
Greg Hurst

Polynomial Step-by-step Functionality

October 29, 2013 —
Comments Off

We’re excited to introduce some brand new features to our step-by-step functionality! Wolfram|Alpha can now guide you through factoring polynomials and completing the square, in addition to being updated to include FOIL and the binomial expansion theorem. Let’s take a look.

How about factor x^4 + x^2 + 1:

factor x^4+x^2+1

Looking at completing the square, three methods are offered! Let’s try complete the square x^2 + 2x + 3:

complete the square x^2+2x+3

Perhaps we’d like the center of a circle:

complete the square x^2+y^2+2x+4y-11=0

Lastly, let’s take a look at our updated expansion steps.

expand (x+1)(2x+3)

How about expand (x^2 + x + 1)(x^2 – x + 1)(x – 3):

expand (x^2+x+1)(x^2-x+1)(x-3)

Stay tuned for more step-by-step functionality releases very soon!

Wolfram|Alpha Pro users have unlimited access to step-by-step features.

2 Comments

Wow, where was this when I needed it in school? It’s one thing for a math workbook to simply provide an answer, but that doesn’t always help when you don’t know how to get there. This is a great tool – the step-by-step assistance is fantastic, and this will hopefully be able to get students past their trouble points to arrive at the correct answer.

Posted by Shaun November 7, 2013 at 12:30 am

is it possible solve this iniquity step by step (1-1/k^2)^x< n^(-(2k+2)) that x=k^3 c log n
which c is a large constant,

Posted by Marefat October 31, 2015 at 10:13 am