Talk:Square root

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Untitled 26 August 2020

Wolfram MathWorld: ”In common usage, unless otherwise specified, "the" square root is generally taken to mean the principal square root.”

So ”generally” that is. But how generally? Is there a standard or an arbiter? Well…

ISO80000-2-9.10, Remarks and examples: ”If a≥0 , then √a≥0 ”

There it is! (Sorry about the bad formatting. I used to be good at this.)83.223.9.100 (talk) 10:09, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

This is not the place for discussing or commenting the content of MathWorld. D.Lazard (talk) 07:23, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

As Nth roots

@Deacon Vorbis: With regard to the reverts on square root and cube root...my intent was simply to inform readers that these concepts are special cases of a more general concept. I'm not sure what "cart" and "horse" map to in this case. What would you want ordered differently, or is there some other way you'd prefer to explain this? Any other editors have any thoughts? -- Beland (talk) 17:39, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Nth roots are a generalization of square and cube roots. Putting the generalization so early in the article may be confusing for readers who are not interested in it. D.Lazard (talk) 08:22, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

@D.Lazard: Were you thinking it would be better at the end of the intro, after mention of endomorphism rings (which despite taking a few years of college math at MIT, I've never heard of)? This is part of the deeper definition of square root, so I'm a bit reluctant to defer it much later than that. -- Beland (talk) 19:05, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

To editor Beland: Copying this post on my talk is really not useful.

I agree that the two examples at the end of the lead were badly choosen, as they are essentially the same, and are too technical. So, I have changed them.

Nevertheless, all these examples are about square roots, while nth roots are not the subject of this article. So I strongly oppose to mention them in the lead. If they should be mentioned in the body article (Nth root is listed in the "See also" section), this should be in a section "Generalizations", close to the bottom of the article. Such a section could mention also a further generalization, Polynomial roots. D.Lazard (talk) 11:23, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

@D.Lazard: I'm not sure what you mean by "Copying this post on my talk"; I haven't posted anything on User talk:D.Lazard. I've added a section "Generalizations" which covers the requested topics. Feel free to move or modify as you see fit. -- Beland (talk) 22:07, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

2 Nov revert

@Deacon Vorbis: Regarding this revert...unfortunately, you have reverted changes for compliance with MOS:DOUBLE, as well as a change that uses prose instead of math notation to make a clean link to square root of 2. Since you didn't mention these changes in your edit summary, I assume they are undisputed and have restored them. If you choose to revert in the future, please take care to revert only the parts of an edit that you are disputing, especially when the change set is so small. Your edit summary said "full-height inline fractions are really bad". The discussion that resulted in MOS:RADICAL accepted the tradeoff that complex expressions would be taller than the rest of the line of prose, as less bad than the ugliness of the broken overline. That includes expressions like this one. If you have a <math>...</math> style markup that reduces this problem, feel free to use it, but changing back to {{sqrt}} style violates the recently affirmed consensus at MOS:RADICAL. -- Beland (talk) 05:58, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I just remembered that setting 'display="inline"' is intended to reduce line height in exactly these situations. I added it and the expression in question looks much less awkward now. Since you didn't add this yourself, I assume you didn't know about it, so no worries. You can read more at Help:Displaying a formula#Inline. -- Beland (talk) 05:58, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

No-overline radical

@Deacon Vorbis: Regarding this revert and your preference for √x over √x: MOS:RADICAL says the √x style "should be avoided whenever technically possible to do so" and that "The use of √ with no overline is acceptable for simple expressions, as long as the operand is unambiguous." <math>...</math> cannot be used in this instance because it is in an image caption, but √ can be used because the operand is simple. By my reading, √x is thus the preferred style in this instance. I don't think whether you or I particularly like this markup has any bearing on which markup to use, since it was determined by RFC (which we both participated in). Did you have any other argument to make other than that you personally think it's "horrible"? -- Beland (talk) 01:56, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

Deacon Vorbis has left Wikipedia, so I restored this change. -- Beland (talk) 03:51, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Hello, but won't you tell me where? special problem and forrouw perturbation sustem for proroprse equality sequentia; Nean (talk) 11:29, 24 March 2021 (UTC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebonysustem.png thumbhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebonysustem.png

Nean (talk) 11:39, 24 March 2021 (UTC)