In mathematics, factorization (also factorisation in British English) or factoring is the decomposition of an object (for example, a number, a polynomial, or a matrix) into a product of other objects, or factors, which when multiplied together give the original. So for example, we have the following expression:
If we factorize it, our result would be
, but why? If you solved that expression, then you will get the same expression we started with, it is because it is the same, but how did we do it? I just took a common term between the numbers and extracted it from them and put it outside the parenthesis, in this case, the common number was 3. If we had that the following expression,
then the common factor would be “x”, so the result would be the following:
You could be asking yourself, what is this useful for? Let’s take for example we have the following division(fig a) first of all, we should start by factorizing both sides of the division so it would be: (fig b), now that we have that there are only multiplications and not any subtraction or sum, we proceed to simplify, 2x is simplified by 6x resulting in: (fig c), the multiplication by one is ignored, so It would be: (fig d)
