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A negative real number −x has no real-valued square roots, but when x is treated as a complex number it has two imaginary square roots, + and , where i is the imaginary unit. In general, any non-zero complex number has n distinct complex-valued n th roots, equally distributed around a complex circle of constant absolute value .
The nested radicals in this solution cannot in general be simplified unless the cubic equation has at least one rational solution. Indeed, if the cubic has three irrational but real solutions, we have the casus irreducibilis , in which all three real solutions are written in terms of cube roots of complex numbers.
Finding roots in a specific region of the complex plane, typically the real roots or the real roots in a given interval (for example, when roots represents a physical quantity, only the real positive ones are interesting). For finding one root, Newton's method and other general iterative methods work generally well.
Polynomial transformations have been applied to the simplification of polynomial equations for solution, where possible, by radicals. Descartes introduced the transformation of a polynomial of degree d which eliminates the term of degree d − 1 by a translation of the roots. Such a polynomial is termed depressed. This already suffices to solve ...
A solution in radicals or algebraic solution is an expression of a solution of a polynomial equation that is algebraic, that is, relies only on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to integer powers, and extraction of n th roots (square roots, cube roots, etc.). A well-known example is the quadratic formula
Finding the roots (zeros) of a given polynomial has been a prominent mathematical problem.. Solving linear, quadratic, cubic and quartic equations in terms of radicals and elementary arithmetic operations on the coefficients can always be done, no matter whether the roots are rational or irrational, real or complex; there are formulas that yield the required solutions.
Newton's method is one of many known methods of computing square roots. Given a positive number a, the problem of finding a number x such that x 2 = a is equivalent to finding a root of the function f(x) = x 2 − a. The Newton iteration defined by this function is given by
A method analogous to piece-wise linear approximation but using only arithmetic instead of algebraic equations, uses the multiplication tables in reverse: the square root of a number between 1 and 100 is between 1 and 10, so if we know 25 is a perfect square (5 × 5), and 36 is a perfect square (6 × 6), then the square root of a number greater than or equal to 25 but less than 36, begins with ...