Friday Algebra Quiz: Find The Roots
Haven't posted a quiz for a while. Tom Wheeler's post on the SLUUG mailing list about 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About prompted me to go on the internet looking for some of the things I remembered from my childhood.
And hours later (you know how it goes: first you go crazy with Google searches, then you get sucked into Wikipedia following hundreds of must-follow links, etc.) I landed here:
It's a college algebra text book from 1904. Does this look like what your college-age kids can handle now? How about you? Are you up to it?
Q: What are the roots of the equation x3 - 9x - 28 = 0?
Strict rules apply: No Mathematica, Maple, MATLAB, WolframAlpha, or any computerized algebra tools.