Cube this problem, and in 1837 Pierre Wantzel proved it to be impossible because the cube root of 2 is not a constructible number. The cube has three uniform colorings, named by the colors of the square faces around each vertex: 111, 112, 123. The cube has three classes of symmetry, which can be represented by vertex-transitive coloring the faces. The highest octahedral symmetry O has all the faces the same color. The dihedral symmetry D comes from the cube being a prism, with all four sides being the same color. The lowest symmetry D is also a prismatic symmetry, with
Cube root can be done with a compass-and-straightedge construction. Newton's method is an iterative method that can be used to calculate the cube root. For real floating-point numbers this method reduces to the following iterative algorithm to produce successively better approximations of the cube root of "a": The method is simply averaging three factors chosen such that at each iteration. Halley's method improves upon this with an algorithm that converges more quickly with each step, albeit consuming more multiplication operations: With either method a poor initial approximation of "x" can give very poor algorithm performance, and coming up with a good initial