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
Prince Rupert's cube this question in "Scientific American", Kay R. Pechenick DeVicci and several other readers showed that the answer for the (3,4) case is the square root of the smaller of two real roots of the polynomial formula_7, which works out to approximately 1.007435. For formula_8, the optimal side length of the largest square in an formula_5-dimensional hypercube is either formula_10 or formula_11, depending on whether formula_5 is even or odd respectively. Prince Rupert's cube In geometry, Prince Rupert's cube (named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine) is the largest cube that can pass through a hole cut through a unit cube,