Cube root this required the construction, now known to be impossible, of the length . A method for extracting cube roots appears in "The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art", a Chinese mathematical text compiled around the 2nd century BCE and commented on by Liu Hui in the 3rd century CE. The Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria devised a method for calculating cube roots in the 1st century CE. His formula is again mentioned by Eutokios in a commentary on Archimedes. In 499 CE Aryabhata, a mathematician-astronomer from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy, gave a method for finding
Nth root group: Find the square root of 152.2756. Find the cube root of 4192 to the nearest hundredth. The principal "n"th root of a positive number can be computed using logarithms. Starting from the equation that defines "r" as an "n"th root of "x", namely formula_80 with "x" positive and therefore its principal root "r" also positive, one takes logarithms of both sides (any base of the logarithm will do) to obtain The root "r" is recovered from this by taking the antilog: For the case in which "x" is negative and "n" is odd, there is one real root "r"