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Vieta's Formulas Calculator
Enter your polynomial coefficients above and click "Apply Vieta's Formulas" to see results.Vieta's formulas establish elegant relationships between the roots of a polynomial and its coefficients, without requiring you to solve the equation first. For a cubic ax³ + bx² + cx + d = 0 with roots r&sub1;, r&sub2;, r&sub3;, the formulas state: the sum of roots r&sub1;+r&sub2;+r&sub3; = −b/a, the sum of pairwise products r&sub1;r&sub2;+r&sub1;r&sub3;+r&sub2;r&sub3; = c/a, and the product of all roots r&sub1;r&sub2;r&sub3; = −d/a.
These formulas are named after François Viète (1540–1603), a French mathematician who pioneered using letters for unknowns. The formulas arise naturally from expanding the factored form a(x−r&sub1;)(x−r&sub2;)(x−r&sub3;) and comparing coefficients with the standard form. They work identically whether the roots are real or complex.
Vieta's formulas serve two critical purposes: error checking (verify that your computed roots are consistent with the original coefficients) and indirect computation (compute symmetric functions of the roots without knowing the roots individually). They are foundational in competition mathematics, abstract algebra, and numerical analysis.
After solving a cubic, check that the sum and product of your roots match −b/a and −d/a respectively.
Many olympiad problems ask about symmetric functions of roots without requiring you to find the roots explicitly.
Vieta's formulas help detect numerical instability — if computed roots don't satisfy the formulas, precision is lost.
The sum of roots is NEGATIVE b/a, and the product is NEGATIVE d/a. Missing these minus signs is extremely common.
All formulas require dividing by the leading coefficient a. If a ≠ 1, the raw coefficient is NOT the answer.
Vieta's formulas work identically for complex roots. The sum and product relationships hold universally.
| Sum of Roots | r&sub1;+r&sub2;+r&sub3; = −b/a |
| Pairwise Products | r&sub1;r&sub2;+r&sub1;r&sub3;+r&sub2;r&sub3; = c/a |
| Product of Roots | r&sub1;·r&sub2;·r&sub3; = −d/a |
| Named After | François Viète (1540–1603) |
| Works With | Both real and complex roots |
Yes! The rules of Vieta apply perfectly even when the roots involve imaginary numbers. The complex parts simply cancel each other out during addition.
No, it only tells you how they relate to each other as a complete set.
Because Vieta's formulas inherently rely on normalizing the polynomial (making the leading coefficient 1) first.
You can verify that the sum of roots equals -b/a, the pairwise product sum equals c/a, and the product of all roots equals -d/a. It is a powerful error-checking tool.
François Viète was a 16th-century French mathematician who pioneered the use of letters to represent unknowns. His formulas connecting roots to coefficients remain a cornerstone of algebra.
