Throughout the course, you will be asked to interpret your result about a problem by plotting it and then thinking critically about what you've drawn and what it tells you about a real situation. The previous problems were about linear relationships. Linear relationships cover an enormous number of situations, but the world is a complicated place, so straight lines are far from complete in describing things. After linear functions and graphs, quadratic ones are the next simplest. A quadratic expression is one of the form for some fixed values of a, b, and c .
Some examples are , etc.
One of the advantages of a computer-assisted approach to math is that the techniques for handling the more complicated quadratic equations are pretty much the same as for the simple linear ones. We start by thinking about the characteristics of a circle. It's round because every point on the circle is the same distance from the center. You should remember that the distance of any point from the origin is given by so, to make each point of our drawing lie an equal distance from the center, we need the equation That means that is the radius of the circle. Quadratic functions are especially important in physics problems which involve the motion of a body which undergoes a constant acceleration, as we shall see in the next section.