Algebra Errors
The topics covered here are errors that students often make in doing algebra, and not just errors typically made in an algebra class. I’ve seen every one of these mistakes made by students in all level of classes, from algebra classes up to senior level math classes! In fact a few of the examples in this section will actually come from calculus.
If you have not had calculus you can ignore these examples. In every case where I’ve given examples I’ve tried to include examples from an algebra class as well as the occasion example from upper level courses like Calculus.
I’m convinced that many of these are mistakes given here are caused by people getting lazy or getting in a hurry and not paying attention to what they’re doing. By slowing down, paying attention to what you’re doing and paying attention to proper notation you can avoid the vast majority of these mistakes!
Division by Zero
Everyone knows that the problem is that far too many people also say that or ! Remember that division by zero is undefined! You simply cannot divide by zero so don’t do it!
Here is a very good example of the kinds of havoc that can arise when you divide by zero. See if you can find the mistake that I made in the work below.
We’ll start assuming this to be true.
Multiply both sides by a.
Subtract from both sides.
Factor both sides.
Divide both sides by .
Recall we started off assuming .
Divide both sides by b.
So, we’ve managed to prove that 1 = 2! Now, we know that’s not true so clearly we made a mistake somewhere. Can you see where the mistake was made?
The mistake was in step 5. Recall that we started out with the assumption . However, if this is true then we have ! So, in step 5 we are really dividing by zero!
That simple mistake led us to something that we knew wasn’t true, however, in most cases your answer will not obviously be wrong. It will not always be clear that you are dividing by zero, as was the case in this example. You need to be on the lookout for this kind of thing.
Remember that you CAN’T divide by zero!