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The Quadratic Formula

History of the Quadratic Formula
The need for the quadratic formula can be seen back to ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and
Babylonians. Egyptian engineers during this time would know a certain area that they had to
work with to build a structure, such as a barn, but they didn’t know how long to make the sides
of these structures to work with the given area. As a result, the engineers used a geometrical
approach to solving these problems, they solved as many versions as they could think of and
recorded them on tables for everyday use. This was an unreliable method because mistakes
could appear in the tables, but the common person wouldn’t know it because they wouldn’t
know any of the math used to find the values in the table. As these tables were made into more
and more copies, even more mistakes showed up (The History of the Quadratic Formula, 2017).

In 400 BCE, the Babylonians found a more general way to solve these problems without looking
them up in the tables. The Babylonians took what we would now call today an algebraic
approach to solving this area problem and through a series of algebraic manipulations came up
with the method we know as completing the square (The History of the Quadratic Formula,
2017). In the 9th century AD Arabic mathematicians solved the same problem geometrically in a
technique similar to how we complete the square with algebra tiles (Coolman, 2015). At this
time, however, neither of these methods allowed for negative numbers (Coolman, 2015).

Around 820 AD Al-Khwarizmi, the man in which algebra is named after, tried his hand at the
problem. He still rejected negative numbers in the equation because mathematicians didn’t have
a way to compute the square root of a negative number. Through his studies, Al-Khwarizmi
provided the standard form of quadratic equations that we use today, ax2 + bx = c (Güner,
2018).

It wasn’t until 1545 when Girolamo Cardano published Ars Magna, his work on algebra. In Ars
Magna, Cardano began work with negative radicals allowing mathematicians to use the
quadratic equation and allow for negatives. By the end of the 16th century, Italian
mathematician Rafael Bombelli published a comprehensive view of algebra including imaginary
numbers. It is at this point in time that mathematicians could use the quadratic formula in the
same way we do today (Pope and Rogers, 2015). During this time, mathematicians could use
the algebraic form of the quadratic formula or visualize it geometrically, but they didn’t actually
know what the graph of such an equation would look like. In 1637, Ren​é Descartes published
La Géométrie, a text describing the Cartesian coordinate plane. With the use of the Cartesian
coordinate plane mathematicians visualize the quadratic formula in a new way.

This picture shows a Babylonian clay

tablet that was being used to find the
area of a shape. The math used to
find the area is shown on the left and
a sketch of the shape is shown on the
right (Maston, 2020).
Activity: Proving the Quadratic Formula
The standard form of a quadratic equation is given as ax2 + bx + c = 0 where a, b, and c are
numbers and x is a variable. Use the complete the square method to solve for x.
After doing this, you should have an equation that looks like

.
This is the Quadratic Formula. What does the quadratic formula tell us?