math question

I been struggling with this dumb thing since I have known math.

show me a method on how to find the greatest common factor and the least common dinominator please guys anyone who is an expert on math help me.

well, im no expert-but I take aglebra = )

ok, the greates common factor is the greatest number two numbers have in common

least common denominator is the opposite

I don't know, but if you serach it on yahoo you will find soo much info

I'm pretty good at math, but not explaining it, but here it goes...

The greatest common factor of two numbers is the biggest whole number that divides evenly into both the numbers. You can find it by figuring out the numbers that you can multiply that get whatever the numbers you have that you need to find the GCF for. or you could use prime factorization. Like say you have 20 and 40 and you need to find the GCF. With the first way, you just list the factors of 20 and 40.
40: 1,2,4,5,8,10, 20,40 and 20: 1,2,4,5,10,20
Compare what factors they have in common. In this case 20 is the GCF.

With prime factorization, you just figure out the prime numbers of 40 and 20 and multiply the common prime factors.

Hope that helped a bit. Hope I wasn't too confusing.

say you have two numbers: 16 and 48

what is the biggest number you can think of that can go into both of those evenly:

2 can go into both of them 16/2 = 8 ; 48/2 = 24
4 can go into both of them 16/4 = 4 ; 48/4 = 12
8 can go into both of them 16/8 = 2 ; 48/8 = 6
16 can go into both of them 16/16 = 1 ; 48/16 = 3

and that's the biggest number that can go into both...any bigger numbers can't go into 16 so ... 16 is your greatest common factor

and least common factor is the smallest number that can go into both (other than 1)...so in this case your least common factor will be 2

hope you understood.