[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?

which means taking a bunch of square roots, which isn’t fast on an FPGA. [nats]’s algorithm is pretty neat: it uses a first-stage lookup to figure out in which broad range the value lies ...

Roots are the opposite of powers. As 2 squared is 4, then a square root of 4 must be 2. \(2^2 = 4\). Reversing this gives \(\sqrt{4} = 2\). To find square roots or cube roots, work backwards from ...

It is not possible to find the square root of a negative number ... The x-coordinate of any point on the y-axis has the value of 0 and substituting \(x = 0\) into the equation \(y = ax^2 ...