I am currently studying for my College Algebra final exam and one of the questions I have to do is the following:
x^3 - 3x^2 - 4x + 12
I was able to simplify down to this:
(x^2 - 4)(x-3)
My question is, can you simplify this further? All the online math calculators seem to suggest that it isn't possible but I found that I could factor (x^2 - 4) to this:
(x-2)(x+2)
So, if I were to simplify the original problem fully, would it look like this:
[(x-2)(x+2)](x-3)
Or this:
(x^2 - 4)(x-3)