Degree of a polynomial on arvau

Wikipedia / Degree of a polynomial

In mathematics, the degree of a polynomial is the highest of the degrees of the polynomial's monomials (individual terms) with non-zero coefficients. The degree of a term is the sum of the exponents of the variables that appear in it, and thus is a non-negative integer. For a univariate polynomial, the degree of the polynomial is simply the highest exponent occurring in the polynomial. The term order has been used as a synonym of degree but, nowadays, may refer to several other concepts (see Order of a polynomial (disambiguation)).

has three terms. The first term has a degree of 5 (the sum of the powers 2 and 3), the second term has a degree of 1, and the last term has a degree of 0. Therefore, the polynomial has a degree of 5, which is the highest degree of any term.

, one can put it in standard form by expanding the products (by distributivity is of degree 1, even though each summand has degree 2. However, this is not needed when the polynomial is written as a product of polynomials in standard form, because the degree of a product is the sum of the degrees of the factors.

Names of polynomials by degree

The following names are assigned to polynomials according to their degree:

Special case – zero (see , below)
Degree 0 – non-zero constant
Degree 1 – linear
Degree 2 – quadratic
Degree 3 – cubic
Degree 4 – quartic (or, if all terms have even degree, biquadratic)
Degree 5 – quintic
Degree 6 – sextic (or, less commonly, hexic)
Degree 7 – septic (or, less commonly, heptic)
Degree 8 – octic
Degree 9 – nonic
Degree 10 – decic

Names for degree above three are based on Latin ordinal numbers, and end in -ic. This should be distinguished from the names used for the number of variables, the arity, which are based on Latin distributive numbers, and end in -ary, is called a "binary quadratic": binary due to two variables, quadratic due to degree two. There are also names for the number of terms, which are also based on Latin distributive numbers, ending in -nomial; the common ones are monomial, binomial, and (less commonly) trinomial is a "binary quadratic binomial".

Examples

, with highest exponent 3.

, with highest exponent 5.

Behavior under polynomial operations

The degree of the sum, the product or the composition of two polynomials is strongly related to the degree of the input polynomials.

Addition

The degree of the sum (or difference) of two polynomials is less than or equal to the greater of their degrees; that is,

Multiplication

The degree of the product of a polynomial by a non-zero scalar is equal to the degree of the polynomial; that is,

Thus, the set of polynomials (with coefficients from a given field F) whose degrees are smaller than or equal to a given number n forms a vector space; for more, see Examples of vector spaces.

More generally, the degree of the product of two polynomials over a field or an integral domain is the sum of their degrees:

For polynomials over an arbitrary ring of integers modulo 4, which is not equal to the sum of the degrees of the factors.

Composition

which has degree 6.

of degree 0.

Degree of the zero polynomial

The degree of the zero polynomial).

Like any constant value, the value 0 can be considered as a (constant) polynomial, called the zero polynomial. It has no nonzero terms, and so, strictly speaking, it has no degree either. As such, its degree is usually undefined. The propositions for the degree of sums and products of polynomials in the above section do not apply, if any of the polynomials involved is the zero polynomial.

It is convenient, however, to define the degree of the zero polynomial to be negative infinity and to introduce the arithmetic rules

and

These examples illustrate how this extension satisfies the behavior rules above:

Computed from the function values

A number of formulae exist which will evaluate the degree of a polynomial function f. One based on asymptotic analysis is

;

this is the exact counterpart of the method of estimating the slope in a log–log plot.

This formula generalizes the concept of degree to some functions that are not polynomials. For example:

The degree of the multiplicative inverse, is 1.
The degree of the square root, is 1/2.
The degree of the logarithm, is 0.
The degree of the exponential function

Another formula to compute the degree of f from its values is

;

this second formula follows from applying L'Hôpital's rule to the first formula. Intuitively though, it is more about exhibiting the degree d as the extra constant factor in the derivative.

A more fine grained (than a simple numeric degree) description of the asymptotics of a function can be had by using big O notation. In the analysis of algorithms, which would both come out as having the same degree according to the above formulae.

Extension to polynomials with two or more variables

For polynomials in two or more variables, the degree of a term is the sum of the exponents of the variables in the term; the degree (sometimes called the total degree) of the polynomial is again the maximum of the degrees of all terms in the polynomial. For example, the polynomial x2y2 + 3x3 + 4y has degree 4, the same degree as the term x2y2.

However, a polynomial in variables x and y, is a polynomial in x with coefficients which are polynomials in y, and also a polynomial in y with coefficients which are polynomials in x. The polynomial

has degree 3 in x and degree 2 in y.

Degree function in abstract algebra

Given a ring R, the polynomial ring R[x] is the set of all polynomials in x that have coefficients in R. In the special case that R is also a field, the polynomial ring R[x] is a principal ideal domain and, more importantly to our discussion here, a Euclidean domain.

It can be shown that the degree of a polynomial over a field satisfies all of the requirements of the norm function in the euclidean domain. That is, given two polynomials f(x) and g(x), the degree of the product f(x)g(x) must be larger than both the degrees of f and g individually. In fact, something stronger holds:

For an example of why the degree function may fail over a ring that is not a field, take the following example. Let R, the ring of integers modulo 4. This ring is not a field (and is not even an integral domain) because 2 × 2 = 4 ≡ 0 (mod 4). Therefore, let f(x) = g(x) = 2x + 1. Then, f(x)g(x) = 4x2 + 4x + 1 = 1. Thus deg(f⋅g) = 0 which is not greater than the degrees of f and g (which each had degree 1).

Since the norm function is not defined for the zero element of the ring, we consider the degree of the polynomial f(x) = 0 to also be undefined so that it follows the rules of a norm in a Euclidean domain.