[Blindmath] Linear formulas for synthetic division algorithm available in Nemeth braille

Susan Jolly via Blindmath blindmath at nfbnet.org
Wed May 14 23:15:36 UTC 2014


Hi Jon,

Thanks for sending me your files.  I'll need time to decide what to do with 
them.

As far as putting in the terms with zero coefficients, this is necessary in 
order to be able to use the general sum notation in the article.

I understand that synthetic division is a special case but I decided my 
article was long enough just covering the cases I limited it to.  Hopefully 
students who take the time to understand the article will think about how it 
can be extended to all polynomials.

I agree this is basically the algorithm for long division.  I chose not to 
get into that  for several reasons.  First is again that my article was 
already long enough and I didn't want to get into a discussion of place 
value.  Second is that the reference I linked to covers long division much 
better than I could.

By the way, the term "long division" seems to have two meanings.  One is the 
name of a particular spatial procedure for division.  But the more important 
meaning is the algorithm for dividing numbers with several digits by numbers 
with two or more digits.  I think it is very important for people who want 
to go into any STEM field to be able to do such division problems without 
the use of a calculator.  This is, of course, close related to the ability 
to approximate the answer to such division problems.

SusanJ 





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