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I don't want to sound smug or anything, but didn't you study it in school? In Spain we learn it in fifth or sixth grade, just after learning the concept of squa
by gordaco 14y ago
I don't want to sound smug or anything, but didn't you study it in school? In Spain we learn it in fifth or sixth grade, just after learning the concept of square root. I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of the world.
The algorithm is a little complicated compared to other things that we study at that age, but it's not really difficult, although most (and I mean MOST) people, even engineers and such, forget it when they don't need it any more. It infuriates me a little that no teacher explained to us why did it work, but that gave me oportunity to "reverse engineer" the method a few years later, and expand it to a generic n-root algorithm.
- yakiv 14y ago> I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of the world. Where do you think GP went to school? Neither the post nor the profile indicates a location. Edit: I should say that I don't know for sure that you don't know from some other post GP made.
- gordaco 14y agoI don't know, that's why I just talked about "the rest of the world". I'm just surprised that this is not as common as I thought it was. Cultural blindness, I guess.
- dalke 14y agoWe also learned it in, I think, 4th grade or perhaps 5th. This was in the US. And yes, I've also forgotten it. I don't think I ever used the method outside of that lesson.
- trhtrsh 14y agoWhy did you just mock someone for asking an honest question, tell them that you knew the answer, and then refuse to share it?
- gordaco 14y agoI'm sorry, that wasn't at all my intention. In any case, I wouldn't be mocking him, but the educational system he studied under (which definitely wouldn't be his fault; to be honest, I've also suffered a quite bad educational system). And I didn't answer him because someone else had done so already in another comment, linking to wikipedia, so I didn't want to be redundant.