Square Root Day September 9, 1981 (9/9/81). Gordon remains the holiday's publicist, sending news releases to world media outlets. Gordon's daughter set up a Facebook group where people can share how they were celebrating the day. One suggested way of celebrating the holiday is by eating square radishes, or other root vegetables cut into shapes with square cross sections (thus creating a "square root"). Square Root Day occurs on the following dates each century: The number of years between consecutive Square Root Days in a century are consecutive odd numbers: 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17. This illustrates the fact that
Square root of a matrix there is a matrix and a diagonal matrix such that . This happens if and only if has "n" eigenvectors which constitute a basis for . In this case, can be chosen to be the matrix with the "n" eigenvectors as columns, and thus a square root of is where is any square root of . Indeed, For example, the matrix formula_14 can be diagonalized as , where giving the square root When is symmetric, the diagonalizing matrix can be made an orthogonal matrix by suitably choosing the eigenvectors (see spectral theorem). Then the inverse of is simply the transpose,