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 square roots. Such a matrix, , has a decomposition where is the matrix whose columns are eigenvectors of and is the diagonal matrix whose diagonal elements are the corresponding eigenvalues . Thus the square roots of are given by , where is any square root matrix of , which, for distinct eigenvalues, must be diagonal with diagonal elements equal to square roots of the diagonal elements of ; since there are two possible choices for a square root of each diagonal element of , there are 2 choices for the matrix . This also leads to a proof of the