I keep googling it and I still don’t understand what they are and their differences 😭😭
In: 18
An easy way to understand these concepts is to look at the equation plotted on a graph. The real roots of an equation are the values where the line/curve intersects the x axis.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=x%5E2-3x+%2B1
You can see visually that the equation above crosses the x axis twice, so it has 2 real roots.
Now there is an interesting property of polynomials, which states that any polynomial of degree n (with n being the highest power), has n roots. The caveats being that:
– Roots can be repeated (double root, triple root, etc)
– Roots can be complex numbers
If you graph the equation and it doesn’t intersect the x axis, then it’s roots are complex.
If the curve at any point touches the x axis but doesn’t pass through, then it has a double root (or more generally a root repeated an even number of times)
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