linguistic:paraphrasing
Elimination of the sub-dominant term

To solve an equation of degree n,

a common preliminary step is to eliminate the degree- n - 1 term: by setting x = y − a n − 1 n a n {\displaystyle x=y-{\frac {a_{n-1}}{n\,a_{n}}}}, equation (E) becomes

Leonhard Euler developed this technique for the case n = 3 but it is also applicable to the case n = 4, for example.