Radicals

A)

Square Roots:
Introduction & Simplification

You already know about squaring. For instance,

22 = 4, 32 = 9, etc. The backwards of squaring is

square-rooting. The symbol for square-rooting is "

", the "radical" symbol. It is used like this:

Now, you can take any counting number and square it, and end up with a nice neat number. But it
doesn't work going backwards. Think about
. There is no nice neat number that squares to 3.
Then
can be handled in either of two ways. If you are doing a word problem, for instance, and
are trying to find something like, say, speed, then grab your calculator and find the decimal
approximation of
:

...and round to an appropriate number of decimal places, like " 1.7 ft/sec". On the other hand, you
may be solving a plain old math problem (with no practical application), in which case you will
almost certainly want the "exact" answer, so you'll just leave the answer as " ".
When you add x's, you do it in the manner of 2x +

Simplify:

3x = 5x. We do the same with radicals:

Adding and subtracting radicals is similar in ways to adding and subtracting polynomial terms.
Just as you can not combine 2x and 3y (because they are not "like terms"), so also you can not
combine

. You can not combine 2 and 3x (because they are not "like terms"); likewise,

you can not combine

Copyright Elizabeth Stapel 2006-2008 All Rights Reserved

You will generally have to "simplify" square root expressions. Some are easy to do:

Simplify:

Don't assume that expressions with unlike radicals cannot be simplified, however. It is possible
that, after simplifying the radicals, the expression can indeed be simplified. For instance:

Simplify:

Here is an important property of square roots:

Write as the product of two radicals:

How was I able to rearrange the original radical like that? Because square roots are flexible with
multiplication. You can factor the insides of a square root, and then split the square root according
to the factors. Sometimes it helps to manipulate the multiplication in the other direction:

Simplify by writing as one radical:

= 30
Here is an example of how you can use this multiplication property to simplify radical expressions:

Simplify:

In general, how do you figure out what can "come out" of a square root? Factor the innards, and
any factor that occurs in pairs can come out. For example:

Simplify:

B) Other Roots and Radicals / Domains / Notes

So far we have dealt only with square roots, but you would manipulate other radicals in much the
same way. However, we need first to cover the notation for these other radicals.
Non-square-root radicals need a number to indicate which root is meant. By default, the simple
radical symbol, " ", is assumed to mean "the square root". This is similar to exponents: if you
have "x2", you know this means "x squared"; if you have just plain old "x", you know that the
exponent is "1". Whenever there is no exponent, the exponent is understood to be " 1"; to indicate
other powers, you insert a number. In the same way, when there is no number on the radical, the
radical is understood to be the square root; to indicate other roots, you insert a number, called the
"index", inside that little "hook" on the front of the radical symbol. For instance:
a square (second) root is written as
a cube (third) root is written as
a fourth root is written as
a fifth root is written as:
...and so on.

Copyright Elizabeth Stapel 2006-2008 All Rights Reserved

When writing a square root, you can put a teeny " 2" in, if you like, but this would be considered
non-standard notation.
The process of simplification in these other roots works similarly to simplification of square roots.
If you have a cube root, you can take out any factor that occurs in threes:

Simplify:

Simplify:

In a fourth root, take out any factor that occurs in fours; in a fifth root, take out any factor that
occurs in fives; etc.

Usually, we cannot have a negative inside a square root. (The exception is for "imaginary"
numbers. If you haven't done the number "i" yet, then you haven't done imaginaries.) So, for

instance,

is not possible. Do not try to say something like "

true:

", because it's not

. You must have a positive inside the square root. For instance:
Find the domain of
The fact that we have x 2 inside a square root requires that
x 2 > 0, and then x > 2.

x 2 be zero or greater, so

On the other hand, you CAN have a negative inside a cube root (or any other odd root). For
instance:

...because (2)3

= 8.

Find the domain of

For
, there is NO RESTRICTION on the value of x, because x
be negative inside a cube root. Then the domain is "all x".

2 is welcome to

Do not confuse "simplifying" with "solving". If you have "x2 = 4", and you take the square root of
either side, you will get x = 2, because you could square either of 2 and +2 to get +4. But
, because "

" is specifically the positive square root. That is:

...and:

Do not confuse these. Finding all the given roots of a number (such as finding all the square roots
of 4 from the equation "x2 = 4") is different from simplifying an expression (such as " "),
because the former uses all the roots but the latter uses only the "principal" root.

C) Simplifying Radical Expressions

Containing Parentheses
You have seen the simple case of radical multiplication, but you will probably have simplification
problems that are more complex. Work with radicals in a manner similar to how you worked with
polynomials. For instance, if you had to multiply 3(x + 2), you would take the 3 through the
parentheses to get 3x + 6. Similarly:

Simplify

Simplify

Simplify

Simplify
You can do this multiplication vertically, just as you did with polynomials. You can do the
multiplication horizontally, too, but I find vertical to be easier for me:

Then I complete the calculations by simplifying:

Simplify
I do the multiplication:

Then I simplify:

Note in the last example above how I ended up with all whole numbers. (Okay, technically they're
integers, but the point is that they are not radicals.) I had multiplied two radical "binomials"
together and gotten an answer that contained no radicals. You may also have noticed that the two
"binomials" were the same except for the sign in the middle. This is important.
Given

, the conjugate is

That is, the conjugate has the same numbers, but has the opposite sign in the middle. In other
words, not only is
the conjugate of
, but
is the conjugate of
.
When you multiply conjugates, you are doing something similar to what happens with a difference
of squares:

a2 b2 = (a + b)(a b)
When you multiply the factors a

Copyright Elizabeth Stapel 2006-2008 All Rights Reserved

+ b and a b, the middle "ab" terms cancel out:

The same thing happens when you multiply conjugates:

We will see shortly why this matters. To get to that point, let's take a look at fractions containing
radicals in their denominators.

D) Rationalizing Radical Denominators

For whatever reason, it is generally considered "improper" to leave radicals in the denominator.
(This is similar to the fuss regarding improper fractions versus mixed numbers: once you get far
enough in math, radicals in the denominator probably won't matter any more, just like, now that
you're in algebra, your teacher doesn't get upset about improper fractions any more, like your
teacher did back in sixth grade.) The process of getting rid of radicals in the denominator is called
"rationalizing the denominator".

Simplify

.
Now you may think "This looks pretty darn simple already!" But, by "simplify", in this case
they mean "get rid of the radical in the denominator". To do this, I will need to turn the
into something else. If you think back to when you were dealing with fractions, you would
get a common denominator by multiplying non-common denominators by some useful
number. For instance, if you needed to turn two-thirds into some kind of nineths, you
would multiply by three-over-three: Copyright Elizabeth Stapel 2006-2008 All Rights Reserved

You follow this same sort of procedure with rationalizing denominators. If you multiply
by another
, you'll get "3". So I'll follow the pattern with radicals as we used to use with
fractions:

When rationalizing denominators, figure out what you need to have in order to be able to take a
square out of the radical (or a cube, if you're dealing with a cube root, etc.), multiply the fraction,
top and bottom, by this value, and simplify. Here's another example:

Simplify

.
This one works just like the previous example, except that I can do some further
simplifying at the end:

It is always a good idea to check if your fraction can be simplified. Usually it can't, but be sure to
check.

Simplify

.
This is an instance of where I'll have to simplify, then multiply, and then simplify again.
The final answer doesn't look a whole lot "simpler" than what I started with, but it won't
have radicals in the denominator, and that's what they're looking for when they say to
"simplify".

What about when you have more than one term in the denominator? This is where the "difference
of squares" conjugate thing comes in. For example:

Simplify

.
You know that if you multiply this denominator by its conjugate, the radicals will
disappear. So I'll multiply the fraction, top and bottom, by the conjugate:

Since I knew I had created a difference of squares in the denominator (that's the point of using
the conjugate), I didn't bother doing the multiplication explicitly, but just converted right to the
difference-of-squares format, and then simplified. That's where the " 9 6" came from.

Simplify

.
This one works the same way as the problem above:

In the last step, by the way, I took the "minus" from the denominator and put it out front. You can
move minuses like that to the front or multiplied through the top; it just isn't considered "standard"
to leave them on the denominator.