Having recently reverse-engineered the quadratic equation, it involves quite a few steps that would be pretty tricky to capture without a lot of time and patience, a very good intuition for algebra, or a decent guiding hand from past memories. Given how much of the structure I can recall from memory, the latter seems most likely, but it’s provably doable without knowing it in the first place, so I won’t dismiss that possibility :)
Having recently reverse-engineered the quadratic equation, it involves quite a few steps that would be pretty tricky to capture without a lot of time and patience, a very good intuition for algebra, or a decent guiding hand from past memories. Given how much of the structure I can recall from memory, the latter seems most likely, but it’s provably doable without knowing it in the first place, so I won’t dismiss that possibility :)
It’s not too hard if you remember that you can get it from completing the square. Or of course you could use calculus.