John Lesieutre from State College Area
High School, Pennsylvania, USA and Marcos Charalambides from
Cyprus sent in excellent solutions to this problem.
Using
we get
.
Using
we get
so
.
Using
we get
so
and
.
Now if
(that is, a general quadratic), then
, and
so the formula works for all quadratics.
Using the same idea as above, to check that it works for cubics, quartics and
quintics, we only have to check it for
,
and
.
and
.
and
.
and
.
but
.
So the formula works for cubics, quartics and quintics, but not for higher
powers.