Sections:

Synthetic Division



About:
Additional Resources:

In this lesson, we will learn how to perform synthetic division. This process allows us to quickly divide a polynomial by a binomial that has the form of (x - a). We can really think about synthetic division as a shortcut to our normal polynomial long division for certain cases. To be specific, this process can only be done when the coefficient of the x-variable in the divisor is a 1 and the variable is raised to the first power. The great thing about this process is that we will work with just the coefficients and constants from the problem. Everything else can be written back into the answer once we are done. This process will come up again when we start trying to find zeros for polynomials later in the course.
+ Show More +