Life & fun · December 17, 2017
Interactive polynomial roots toy
Interactive toy for visualizing relationship between polynomial roots and coefficients
Interactive polynomial roots toy launched on December 17, 2017 with 69 votes, #671 of 2,482 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 8 years on.
In plain words
Interactive polynomial roots toy is a visual learning tool that demonstrates how polynomial roots and coefficients relate to each other in the complex plane. Created by a physics professor, it lets users drag red dots representing roots and see how the polynomial coefficients change in real time. Based on the fundamental theorem of algebra, the tool shows that any polynomial can be expressed as a product of its roots, helping users understand elementary symmetric polynomials through interactive exploration.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Physics Professor, U of MS. Black holes, gravitational waves, general relativity and beyond. Grab the red dots and play around! Or jump to the explanation , or try this . From the fundamental theorem of algebra , there are exactly n roots in the complex plane. 1 The same polynomial can be written as Let’s set for simplicity (this is called a monic polynomial). Now, if you have the roots, finding the values of the coefficients is straightforward: just expand out the product in Eq. \eqref{eq:factored}. The functions are known as elementary symmetric polynomials (up to a sign). If you move a root, you can see how all the coefficients change. Solving for the ’s from the ’s with some algebraic…from duetosymmetry.com
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