How to Calculate the Square Root of Any Number, Digit by Digit Method
665K views · Oct 17, 2025 · Science & Technology
Comments · 1.9K
@DrunkenUFOPilot · 10 months ago · pinned
Thanks!
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@crosshairs007 · 11 months ago
Why the hell did they never teach me this? This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that is the MOST interesting. Who cares if you can type in the right numbers and symbols on a calculator, I want to be able to figure it out by myself with no calculator.
1.3K
@belaayya5094 · 10 months ago
I wish my dad was still alive so I could call him and tell him I can calculate a square root by hand now! He spent hours at the table trying to teach me math, and it often ended in tears for me, and him feeling helpless. But now I realize -- in the 80s, they never taught us long division. That came from my dad. They told us to memorize the times tables, but I struggled. Daddy taught me how to add to get the answer. And alllllll that came together now for me to understand how to calculate a square root. I sure hope he's up there and beaming with pride. When school failed me, he taught me the only way he knew how, and it culminated in something magical tonight. Thank you so much for this! Now...can you teach me algebra?
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@kevinjohnston8637 · 11 months ago
"Let's stop teaching the square root algorithm, let's teach guess/divide/average instead. And also, let's stop teaching divide". Brilliant.
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@ryanbrown982 · 11 months ago
This sounds a hell of a lot like "balanced reading" where you teach kids to guess what a word might be based on pictures and context. Rather than, ya know, teaching kids to read.
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@kurtisburtis · 11 months ago
Mom got me homeschooling textbooks when I was a kid, which is where I first learned this method.
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@MmmM-mf3zd · 11 months ago
Hidden gem of a topic I’d been searching for years and years: how to calculate roots by hand.
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@probag8414 · 11 months ago
This is why I love this channel. In Math classes, the teacher would always give us the 2025 example. Clean. No curveballs. <br>The rest would be on the test and we'd all drown.
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@joetyndall3382 · 8 months ago
I did this as a kid, got into MIT, used it until calculators came into existence during fall 1971, got a calculator for Christmas and promptly stopped using this algorithm cause the calculator was faster.
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@aguyontheinternet8436 · 11 months ago
Calling long division “meaningless rote” is crazy to me. For beginner students, long division is the only method of dividing polynomials that HAS meaning. It’s the only one students can understand, a method they could easily come up with themselves if they really needed to. But something like synthetic division is inherently more obtuse, because you need to have a thorough understanding of long division to get why it works.
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@pabloverdi7543 · 7 months ago
I went to public schools in 60s/70s and was taught New Math. My Mom taught college accounting. When she saw my homework, she taught me long division, multiplication, basic algebra, fractions, etc. served as a solid base for a career in Computer science. Thanks Mom.
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@kvetter · 11 months ago
In binary this algorithm simplifies nicely. The tricky step of finding "b" comes down to only two choices, zero or one, and thus simplifies into a comparison. Everything else is shifting and subtracting.
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