Chapter 5
Taming Rampaging Radicals
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making radical expressions simpler
Trimming down radical fractions
Working in fractional exponents
Performing operations using fractional exponents
The operation of taking a square root, cube root, or any other root is an important one in algebra (as well as in science and other areas of mathematics). The radical symbol (
) indicates that you want to take a root (what multiplies by itself to give you the number or value) of an expression. A more convenient notation, though, is to use an exponent, or power. This exponent is easily incorporated into algebraic work and makes computations easier to perform and results easier to report.
When you do square roots, the symbol for that operation is a radical, 
. A cube root has a small 3 in front of the radical, ; a fourth root has a small 4, , and so on.
The radical is a nonbinary operation ...
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