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
Nth root Any expression containing a radical, whether it is a square root, a cube root, or a higher root, is called a "radical expression", and if it contains no transcendental functions or transcendental numbers it is called an algebraic expression. In calculus, roots are treated as special cases of exponentiation, where the exponent is a fraction: Roots are particularly important in the theory of infinite series; the root test determines the radius of convergence of a power series. Roots can also be defined for complex numbers, and the complex roots of 1 (the roots of unity) play an important role in