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The imaginary unit or unit imaginary number ( i) is a solution to the quadratic equation x2 + 1 = 0. Although there is no real number with this property, i can be used to extend the real numbers to what are called complex numbers, using addition and multiplication. A simple example of the use of i in a complex number is 2 + 3i.
Square root. Notation for the (principal) square root of x. For example, √ 25 = 5, since 25 = 5 ⋅ 5, or 52 (5 squared). In mathematics, a square root of a number x is a number y such that ; in other words, a number y whose square (the result of multiplying the number by itself, or ) is x. [1] For example, 4 and −4 are square roots of 16 ...
An imaginary number is the product of a real number and the imaginary unit i, [note 1] which is defined by its property i2 = −1. [1] [2] The square of an imaginary number bi is −b2. For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. The number zero is considered to be both real and imaginary. [3]
Continued fraction. The square root of 3 is the positive real number that, when multiplied by itself, gives the number 3. It is denoted mathematically as or . It is more precisely called the principal square root of 3 to distinguish it from the negative number with the same property. The square root of 3 is an irrational number.
The square root of 2 (approximately 1.4142) is a positive real number that, when multiplied by itself or squared, equals the number 2. It may be written in mathematics as or . It is an algebraic number, and therefore not a transcendental number.
The fast inverse square root is used to generalize this calculation to three-dimensional space. The inverse square root of a floating point number is used in digital signal processing to normalize a vector, scaling it to length 1 to produce a unit vector. [14] For example, computer graphics programs use inverse square roots to compute angles of ...
Pell number. In mathematics, the Pell numbers are an infinite sequence of integers, known since ancient times, that comprise the denominators of the closest rational approximations to the square root of 2. This sequence of approximations begins 1 1, 3 2, 7 5, 17 12, and 41 29, so the sequence of Pell numbers begins with 1, 2, 5, 12, and 29.
Similarly, Baudhayana discovered that x = 17, y = 12 and x = 577, y = 408 are two solutions to the Pell equation, and that 17/12 and 577/408 are very close approximations to the square root of 2. Later, Archimedes approximated the square root of 3 by the rational number 1351/780.