Question

Can someone actually explain to me how to divide a polynomial by a binomial?

Answer 1

It is kind of a difficult process to describe without being able to just do one right in front of you, at least for me anyway. I usually start by filling in with 0x^n any degress that are missing from the largest down to the constant. You don't HAVE to do that, but I found myself prone to errors when I skipped that. Then I just performed the division very much like the long division algorithm I learned in grade school.

The idea is to multiply the variable term of the binomial by whatever you need to in order to get the leftmost variable term of the polynomial to sum to zero at each step of the process.

Sorry I can't make this more clear. It's one of those things that is difficult to describe just using words, but is very easy to understand if the process is demonstrated in front of you.

Answer 2

Thanks for trying though. :/