6 ms·
How is this a 'lost art'? I had to do this in college. Didn't we all?
by chirau 9y ago
How is this a 'lost art'? I had to do this in college. Didn't we all?
- jameskilton 9y agoI graduated highschool in 2002 and college in 2006. I've never done square roots by hand or even seen how it would be done until now.
- cavDXF 9y agoI did. (as a millenial) I didn't even study a subject connected to mathematics. I came across it and thought it was neat, so i learned it... but forgot it.
- tjr 9y agoI sometimes relax my mind and drift off to sleep by doing basic square root calculations in my head.
- steaknsteak 9y agoI graduated college a year ago and I'm not sure if I've ever in my life been asked to manually compute a square root (except for a perfect square integer).
- yazan94 9y agoSame here. And I distinctly remember asking a math teacher in middle school if a number was a perfect square and we manually ended up checking and incrementing numbers until we decided that the number was not. It makes me think that this was possibly not such a common task to assign in school?
- dmoy 9y agoDepends on your course load. My EE courses forced you to do this (and then forced you to do it in hardware... on a crappy chip that I swear lacked an overflow bit, but my memory is fuzzy).
- deathanatos 9y agoI never formally learned any algorithm for performing square roots in either high school or college. In the few cases that I've needed one, I've simply binary searched out the answer to the required precision, and called it a day.
- pps43 9y agoYour approach is equivalent to the one described in the article, the only difference is that they use base 10 instead of base 2.
- schoen 9y agoI think deathanatos meant binary search as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm rather than representing numbers or performing arithmetic in base 2.
- pps43 9y agoIf you perform the algorithm described in the article in base 2 rather than base 10, you'll get binary search. Instead of (10 A) do (2 A), etc. Each step is easier (no guessing and checking), but there are more steps because each step gives you one bit rather than one decimal digit.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoI guess thats a form of binary search, however thats not what I was thinking. For example: sqrt(7720.17) first guess 50: 2500 Go up second guess 100: 10000 too high go down third guess 75 5625 too low go up fourth guess 86 (for ease of calculation) 6400 480 + 480 36 7396 too low go up: 93 8529 too high go down: 90 8100 too high go down: 88 7744 Etc. It's not a great method, but it's what first came to mind. I do it sometimes in my head for a quick estimate.
- pps43 9y ago
- zacharycohn 9y agoNope. In fact, I distinctly remember one of my earlier frustrations of high school was asking the teacher how to do square roots. She said "with a calculator." "Yeah yeah, but how to do you do them by hand?" "You don't, you just need to use the calculator." I've never heard of anyone below the age of 30 learning in school how to do them manually.
- abritinthebay 9y ago37 here - god no. I think it was mentioned that you could but other than knowing it was possible I’ve never seen anyone do it.
- agjacobson 9y agoGrade school. 6th grade. PS241 Brooklyn nyah!
- breadbox 9y agoDefinitely not (and I went to college when I was one of the few students who arrived with his own computer). Our chemistry teacher spent one class showing us how to use Newton's approximation, and most students found it a complete waste of time, given that everybody had a pocket calculator of some kind. (Of course, I learned how to calculate square roots on paper before I went to college, but only because I asked my father to show me how.)
- BenjiWiebe 9y agoI went to a parochial school. I think I learned it in 5th grade. Or 6th.