Systems of Equations Introduction

You are sitting at a table with a few pieces of paper and a box of crayons. You draw a line with a red crayon. You draw another line with a blue crayon to make an X. Congratulations! You just graphed a system of equations and found the intersection. You might even notice the little purple dot of the intersection where the red mixed with the blue. You had no idea that you have been solving systems of equations since you were four years old.

In this chapter, you will learn many things: finding the intersection of two lines, finding the intersection of three planes, and even finding the intersection to two regions. This chapter is all about systems of equations and inequalities, and just to spice things up, there are a lot of matrix operations in here as well to make things easier for solving.

To add to the party, we'll show you how to break polynomials into partial fractions. (Doesn't that sound like fun? We're talking Barrel of Monkeys, here.) But after you get through this, we assure you that this precalculus chapter will be a breeze. You might even feel prepared for calculus or a linear algebra class in college.