I’m about to take a college entrance exam and I just can’t make sense of it all. A friend of mine called them “spicy fractions” but I genuinely do not understand. Like, what does it mean, in a physical and earthly sense when you have something like 5[Square root of 2] (which according to this, it’s 50). What is this notation for, and what does it accomplish in a real world setting? What properties apply to them, and how do you even *get* to these types of numbers?
In: Mathematics
As a physical and earthly thing: draw a line. If you make that line into a square, the area of the square is the length of the line squared. I.e., a square with sides that are 5 feet long has an area of 5*5=25 square feet.
Finding the square root is doing it in reverse. If you have a square that has an area of 50 square feet, then how long is one of the sides? Answer: The square root of 50. (I.e. 5 times the square root of 2).
Then you start finding squares and square roots in all sorts of geometry, which gets more complicated but is built in this foundation.
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