CEG 4112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Verb

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Computer Engineering
• Course: CEG 4112
• Professor: Weixuan Li

Document Summary

Lesson goal: the student will be able to rationalize both monomial denominators and binomial denominators. The process by which a rational expression is written so that the denominator contains only rational numbers or variables is known as rationalizing. The goal of rationalizing is to remove any radical or complex numbers from the denominator. A rational expression is not considered to be in simplest form if its denominator includes a radical or a complex number. Sometimes it is useful to rationalize the numerator as well. To rationalize a monomial denominator, multiply the numerator and denominator by the radical denominator. We can rationalize a binomial denominator by multiplying it by its conjugate. ie: the conjugate of a+ b is a b . They are known as a conjugate pair because they have the same terms but opposite operations. The product of a conjugate pair is always a difference of two squares.