h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I totally agree

That's my opinion on anything more advanced than 2+2

I heartily concur, what! Jeeves, pass the scones, ther's a good chap!

This is (surprisingly) a lie. I am not a member of the gentry. I am, in fact, currently doing GCSE maths, and as I have forgotten my calculator yet again, this may save me from total humiliation and/or confusion. Even though I am currently doing something totally unrelated to square roots (graphs, natch), this is very useful.

Coincidence, in 10 minutes I've got trigonometrie, and the only thing that keeps me sane is my CASIO graphic calculator. It's got capabilities that would give me a splitting headache!

Dear god, that is amazing, now it is time to make my math teacher look stupid yet again...QUICK, TOO GEOMETRY (i want to take trig and calculus but they dont let sompmores take those)

Wow indeed! This is the end of a long and dusty search. I never dreamt I would find this information again, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for posting it. The story is that I was, at my primary school, a mathematical prodigy; I was taught separately from the rest of the class. At the age of nine I was taking square roots by the method you describe. However , two years later, after a one-term spell at another school, I came back to find that the rest of the class had been taught the square roots, and I had forgotten how to do them! I was devastated, and admitted this to nobody. As the years progressed, and my qualifications increased (I have a successful career as an engineer) I became reluctant to admit that I still could not remember how to do square roots. But now, this evening, I have found the lost piece in the jigsaw of my education! It is a huge comfort to be able to do this again, and I shall no longer be using a calculator to take square roots!

Why not...isn't it, like, faster and less prone to errors?

Not if you're doing it in base 7.


GTB

*brain liquifies and leaks out of nose*

*passes Ralph a Kleenex*

I guess I can't think of a reason you'd want to extract a square root in base 7, unless you're just fascinated by the pattern of digits that emerges, which some number theorists probably are... Or if someone bets you actual cash that you can't do it; that'd be a reason. In the right context, I'd do a base 7 square root for a beer. How likely is that to come up, though?



GTB

Not very often. That's like stockpiling stuffed parrots, just in case somebody needs one.