This has nothing to do with complex numbers, so I've moved it to somewhere a little more appropriate.

There are lots of ways to approach this, but this is the "easiest" explanation I can come up with. Assuming you're working in something nice like a field (If you don't know what a field is, don't worry. You're in one) then to expand brackets you take each element in the first bracket and multiply by each element in the second bracket, then you add all these products together. For example

Now, the leading coefficient will be the one with the highest power of x, so what we should do is for each bracket multiply by the element that gives us the higest power of x. multiplying by x, increases the power of x by 1, and multiplying by 2 doesn't increase the power of x. Therefore the leading term is so has coeficient 1.

That was a really easy example though, try to find the leading coefficient of . If my mental arithmetic is any good the answer should be -32768.

If you don't agree with my answer, or have any other problems then feel free to write back.

Hope that helps

Kev