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 Nth root In mathematics, an "n"th root of a number "x", where "n" is usually assumed to be a positive integer, is a number "r" which, when raised to the power "n" yields "x": where "n" is the "degree" of the root. A root of degree 2 is called a "square root" and a root of degree 3, a "cube root". Roots of higher degree are referred by using ordinal numbers, as in "fourth root", "twentieth root", etc. For example: Any non-zero number, considered as complex number, has "n" different "complex roots of degree "n"" ("n"th roots), including those with