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In mathematics, a cube root of a number x is a number y that has the given number as its third power; that is =.. All nonzero real numbers have exactly one real cube root and a pair of complex conjugate cube roots, and all nonzero complex numbers have three distinct complex cube roots.
The other roots of the equation are obtained either by changing of cube root or, equivalently, by multiplying the cube root by a primitive cube root of unity, that is . This formula for the roots is always correct except when p = q = 0 , with the proviso that if p = 0 , the square root is chosen so that C ≠ 0 .
In the case of three real roots, the square root expression is an imaginary number; here any real root is expressed by defining the first cube root to be any specific complex cube root of the complex radicand, and by defining the second cube root to be the complex conjugate of the first one.
A root of degree 2 is called a square root and a root of degree 3, a cube root. Roots of higher degree are referred by using ordinal numbers, as in fourth root, twentieth root, etc. The computation of an n th root is a root extraction. For example, 3 is a square root of 9, since 3 2 = 9, and −3 is also a square root of 9, since (−3) 2 = 9.
The cube function is the function x ↦ x 3 (often denoted y = x 3) that maps a number to its cube. It is an odd function, as (−n) 3 = −(n 3). The volume of a geometric cube is the cube of its side length, giving rise to the name. The inverse operation that consists of finding a number whose cube is n is called extracting the cube root of n ...
As for every cubic polynomial, these roots may be expressed in terms of square and cube roots. However, as these three roots are all real, this is casus irreducibilis, and any such expression involves non-real cube roots. As Φ 8 (x) = x 4 + 1, the four primitive eighth roots of unity are the square roots of the primitive fourth roots, ± i.
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Casus irreducibilis (from Latin 'the irreducible case') is the name given by mathematicians of the 16th century to cubic equations that cannot be solved in terms of real radicals, that is to those equations such that the computation of the solutions cannot be reduced to the computation of square and cube roots.