X-Routed: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 13:27:50 -0500
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 13:27:15 -0500
From: Terry 
Subject: Square Roots

We are just curious about to manually calculate square roots.  Not just what's the root of 9 or 
16, but how to find, for example, the root of 13?  Thanx for letting us know.

John and Terry

In the Resource Room there is a note, written by a teacher, that contains a geometric view of the square root algorithm.

You should be aware that this is not a very useful algorithm. Your calculator, for example, uses an entirely different procedure for finding square roots. Actually no procedure with "find" the square root of 13, since the root of 13 is irrational, that is, it is not an integer and cannot be written as a common fraction of the form a/b. The square root of an integer is either an integer, as in the case of 9 or 16, or is irrational and the decimal part is infinite and non-repeating.

Cheers
Harley