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
Principal root of unity Principal root of unity In mathematics, a principal "n"-th root of unity (where "n" is a positive integer) of a ring is an element formula_1 satisfying the equations In an integral domain, every primitive "n"-th root of unity is also a principal formula_3-th root of unity. In any ring, if formula_3 is a power of formula_5, then any formula_6-th root of formula_7 is a principal formula_3-th root of unity. A non-example is formula_9 in the ring of integers modulo formula_10; while formula_11 and thus formula_9 is a cube root of unity, formula_13 meaning that it is not a "principal" cube