Calculus For Dummies, 2nd Edition

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:

You can’t divide by zero! The denominator ...