Root Finding

Finding the root of a function y(x) refers to finding values of x for which y(x)=0.

This is often used as a method of solving equations. For example, consider the equation

   x - 4 = 2.

One method of approaching this might be to reformat the equation so that one side of the equation is equal to zero. Subtracting the 2 from both side in the above example would give us

   x - 6 = 0.

This particular example is fairly trivial, but suppose you have the equation

   x2 + x = 6.

This could be reformatted as

   x2 + x - 6 = 0

or

   (x + 3) (x - 2) = 0

and the equation can be easily soved by inspection.