Unit
Radical Expressions and Equations
MA, Stanford University
Teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area
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There are two ways to simplify radicals that we look at here. For the first method, you need to be pretty strong with your ability to look at a number and find a perfect square that multiplies into it. The general idea is that you re-write the original radical as the product of two radicals, one of which is a perfect square. Then you simplify the perfect square piece. If you are not as good at working with perfect squares, in a second method, you break the integer into it's prime factorization, and look for pair of primes that show up. That pair represents the square root of a perfect square, and one of those values can go outside the root.
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