In mathematics, Vieta's formulas are formulas that relate the coefficients of a polynomial to sums and products of its roots. Named after François Viète, the formulas are used specifically in algebra.
Basic formulas
Any general polynomial of degree n is known by the fundamental theorem of algebra to have complex roots. Vieta's formulas relate polynomial's coefficients to signed sums of products of the roots as follows: Vieta's formulas can equivalently be written as for (the indices are sorted in increasing order to ensure each product of roots is used exactly once. The left-hand sides of Vieta's formulas are the elementary symmetric functions of the roots.
Generalization to rings
Vieta's formulas are frequently used with polynomials with coefficients in any integral domain. Then, the quotients belong to the ring of fractions of and the roots are taken in an algebraically closed extension. Typically, is the ring of the integers, the field of fractions is the field of the rational numbers and the algebraically closed field is the field of the complex numbers. Vieta's formulas are then useful because they provide relations between the roots without having to compute them. For polynomials over a commutative ring which is not an integral domain, Vieta's formulas are only valid when is a non zero-divisor and factors as. For example, in the ring of the integers modulo 8, the polynomial has four roots: 1, 3, 5, and 7. Vieta's formulas are not true if, say, and, because. However, does factor as and as, and Vieta's formulas hold if we set either and or and.
Example
Vieta's formulas applied to quadratic and cubic polynomial: The roots of the quadratic polynomial satisfy The first of these equations can be used to find the minimum of ; see. The roots of the cubic polynomial satisfy
Proof
Vieta's formulas can be proved by expanding the equality , multiplying the factors on the right-hand side, and identifying the coefficients of each power of Formally, if one expands the terms are precisely where is either 0 or 1, accordingly as whether is included in the product or not, and k is the number of that are excluded, so the total number of factors in the product is n – as there are n binary choices, there are terms – geometrically, these can be understood as the vertices of a hypercube. Grouping these terms by degree yields the elementary symmetric polynomials in – for xk, all distinct k-fold products of
History
As reflected in the name, the formulas were discovered by the 16th century French mathematician François Viète, for the case of positive roots. In the opinion of the 18th century British mathematician Charles Hutton, as quoted by Funkhouser, the general principle was first understood by the 17th century French mathematician Albert Girard:
... the first person who understood the general doctrine of the formation of the coefficients of the powers from the sum of the roots and their products. He was the first who discovered the rules for summing the powers of the roots of any equation.
