WOW! A Most Amazing Answer
hey, i'm presh talwalkar, reminding you to care about your decisions, simplify and prove your
answer
to the following expression, you can't use calculators or computers. I received many email requests for this type of problem. First, can you solve it? Try this problem, and when you're ready, continue watching the video to find a solution. So how can we simplify this expression? First I'll write a as the number under the first cube root and then b will do that. be a conjugate square root that is below the second cube root, notice that the cube root of a is a real number and the cube root of b is a real number, so their sum will also be a real number, so in the end we are looking for a real number now we will set this whole expression which is the cube root of a plus the cube root of b we will equal it to x now we will cube both sides and then expand now let's simplify this expression first we will put the squares inside these cube roots now we will group these cube roots together we can write a squared as a a and b squared as bb notice we have an a b term here and a ba term here and they will be equal to each other what is the product of the conjugate square roots? the cool thing is that it's going to be a difference of squares and this simplifies to be negative five cubed, we'll plug it in and now negative 5 cubed if we take the cube root of that, we end up with negative 5. 3 times minus 5 equals negative 15 so we have negative 15 and we can group the remaining terms which will be the cube root of a plus the cube root of b now we remember that x was defined to be exactly this quantity so we can plug that in now a plus b will equal just 16 because the square root terms will cancel out so we'll end up with a simple polynomial expression x cubed equals 16 minus 15x if there is a solution to this equation we are looking for a real value for be the answer
to our original expression , so we write x cubed plus 15x minus 16 equals 0.![wow a most amazing answer]()
How can we solve this equation well? You can usually try special values and you'll quickly see that x equals 1 is a solution to this equation, so x minus 1 will be a factor of this polynomial, so we can factor this into the following product of x minus 1 and the quadratic x squared plus x plus 16. We can solve the quadratic using the quadratic formula, but we will learn that quadratic roots involve non-zero imaginary parts, so r strange roots cannot be the
answer
to our original problem because we are looking for a real value of x this means the answer
is x equals one wow this is a very unexpected answer
to a simple algebra problem now you could Recheck this exercise by writing it in tungsten alpha.![wow a most amazing answer]()
Will it give the
answer
of one? Surprisingly, you may find that it gives a complex answer
with a non-zero imaginary part. What's going on? Well, alpha tungsten is using the taproot. The reason is the equation x cubed equals c has three solutions and alpha tungsten will take the main branch cut which is most
commonly used in higher mathematics, but we don't want the main branch cut, we want the real valued root, so, how can we force tungsten alpha to do that there are a couple of ways one can use the cube root command which will in fact give you the real valued root and you will get the answer
one and for other roots you can use the command nonsense of x comma n this will give you the real nth root of x that's a pretty good problem thanks for watching these math videos available for free on youtube builds confidence for students and inspires math discovery for viewers around the world have over 100 million views and the channel has over 1 million subscribers subscribe free to get the newest videos you can email me a puzzle or math topic icas presh mindyourdecisions.com if you want you can see my merchandise on teespring you can see my books listed in the video description ion and you can support me on patreon thanks for looking and thanks for your support![wow a most amazing answer]()
