The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But ...

A root is the opposite of a power. The root of a number is another number that can be multiplied by itself to get the first number. As 2 squared is 4, then a square root of 4 must be 2: \(2^2 = 4\).

After seeing an exhibit of an old relay-based computer as a kid, [Simon] was inspired to build a simple two-relay latching circuit. Since then, he’s been fascinated by how relays can function to do ...

[MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of two or 1.41421. How did they know that? We don’t ...

Legendary investor Sir John Templeton once said that If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd. Templeton, who is regarded as the greatest ...

We present a novel idea to compute square roots over finite fields, without being given any quadratic nonresidue, and without assuming any unproven hypothesis. The algorithm is deterministic and the ...