ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the following ones, we are going to discuss solving polynomial equations. For a quadratic equation, it is easy to write a formula for the roots. This formula tells you a lot about them and is very useful. There is a similar formula for the roots of a cubic. But it is more complicated, less informative, and less useful (see Chapter 20). For quartics this is even more so, and for equations of degree greater than 4, such formulas do not even exist. So in trying to describe the solutions of an equation we will take a different approach, namely the one outlined in the introduction to Chapter 14.
