Sunday 19 June 2005 at 2:50 pm | In Articles | 7 Comments

A long time ago UK students used to learn how to do polynomial long division before they were 16. Nowadays, they see little of it until they reach A level, and the new national syllabus expects them to learn the remainder theorem for AS (16+). They don’t actually need to do long division as examples are usually simple enough to allow one to guess factors; for example and has to be found. Nevertheless, it is useful to be able to do long division and, given the time constraints, I usually use Synthetic Division.

allows you not only to show the steps of either method, it will also do the mathematics for you, thanks to the polynom package. The code \polylongdiv{x^3-7x+6}{x-1} produces

and \polyhornerscheme[x=1]{x^3-7x+6} gives

There’s lots more possibilities such as

Brilliant! You can watch an online demo of the polynom package doing division step-by-step in a number of different ways here. Click to move the demo on, press Esc to end it.

Please note: \polyhornerscheme is not available in versions of polynom before version 0.16, so if you wish to use \polyhornerscheme do make sure you get the latest version, perhaps from here