Chapter 4
Pre-Algebra and Algebra Review
In This Chapter
Winning the fraction battle: Divide and conquer
Boosting your powers and getting to the root of roots
Laying down the laws of logarithms and having fun with factoring
Hanging around the quad solving quadratics
Algebra is the language of calculus. You can’t do calculus without knowing algebra any more than you can write Chinese poetry without knowing Chinese. So, if your pre-algebra and algebra are a bit rusty — you know, all those rules for algebraic expressions, equations, fractions, powers, roots, logs, factoring, quadratics, and so on — make sure you review the following basics.
Fine-Tuning Your Fractions
Open a calculus book to any random page and you’ll very likely see a fraction — you can’t escape them. Dealing with them requires that you know a few rules.
Some quick rules
First is a rule that’s simple but very important because it comes up time and time again in the study of calculus:
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
You can’t divide by zero! The denominator ...