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 root". An example is the matrix formula_11. In general, a complex matrix with positive real eigenvalues has a unique square root with positive eigenvalues called the "principal square root". Moreover, the operation of taking the principal square root is continuous on this set of matrices. If the matrix has real entries, then the square root also has real entries. These properties are consequences of the holomorphic functional calculus applied to matrices. The existence and uniqueness of the principal square root can be deduced directly from the Jordan normal form (see below). For a 2 × 2 matrix, there are explicit