A parabola is a curve that is described by a quadratic equation. You may be presented with a quadratic equation in one of several forms and then asked to:
This article will describe the simplest approach for the different forms of the quadratic equation.
The general quadratic form is:
This article will describe how to find the vertex, x-intercepts and y-intercepts for this form of a quadratic equation.
If a quadratic can be factored it may be expressed in the following form:
This article will describe how to find the vertex, x-intercepts and y-intercepts for this form of a quadratic equation.
This is the “standard” form of the quadratic equation:
where 
This article will describe how to find the vertex, x-intercepts and y-intercepts for this form of a quadratic equation.
Given a system of simultaneous equations in matrix form
Where is an invertable n x n square matrix,
is a variables column matrix containing
and
is a constants matrix containing
.
Then can be found with Cramer’s rule,
Cramer's rule
Where is formed by replacing the ith column of
with
.
Craig Rose
