1 Polynomial functions
A very important type of function is the polynomial . Polynomial functions are made up of multiples of non-negative whole number powers of a variable, such as , and so on. You are already familiar with many such functions. Other examples include:
(The linear function you have already met).
where , and are independent variables.
Note that fractional and negative powers of the independent variable are not allowed so that and are not polynomials. The function is a polynomial - we can regard it as .
By convention a polynomial is written with the powers either increasing or decreasing. For example the polynomial
would be written as
In general we have the following definition:
Key Point 11
A polynomial expression has the form
where is a non-negative integer, , , , are constants and is a variable.
A polynomial function has the form
The degree of a polynomial or polynomial function is the value of the highest power. Referring to the examples listed above, polynomial has degree 2, because the term with the highest power is , has degree 4, has degree 1 and has degree 0. Polynomials with low degrees have special names given in Table 5.
Table 5
degree | name | |
0 | constant | |
1 | linear | |
2 | quadratic | |
3 | cubic | |
4 | quartic | |
Typical graphs of some polynomial functions are shown in Figure 30. In particular, observe that the graphs of the linear polynomials, and are straight lines.
Figure 30 :
Task!
Which of the polynomial graphs in Figure 30 are odd and which are even? Are any periodic ?
is even. is odd. None are periodic.
Task!
State which of the following are polynomial functions. For those that are, state the degree and name.
- polynomial of degree 4 (quartic),
- polynomial of degree 3 (cubic),
- not a polynomial,
- polynomial of degree 0 (constant),
- polynomial of degree 0 (constant)
Exercises
- Write down a polynomial of degree 3 with independent variable .
- Write down a function which is not a polynomial.
- Explain why is not a polynomial.
-
State the degree of the following polynomials:
- ,
- ,
- ,
- Write down a polynomial of degree 0 with independent variable .
- Referring to Figure 27, state which functions are one-to-one and which are many-to-one.
- For example .
- For example .
- A term such as , with a fractional index, is not allowed in a polynomial.
-
- 4,
- 3,
- 0,
- 1.
- , for example.
- , and are one-to-one. The rest are many-to-one.