{"id":122,"date":"2005-09-21T15:55:21","date_gmt":"2005-09-21T07:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=122"},"modified":"2016-04-05T09:34:29","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T01:34:29","slug":"square-root-16-how-many-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/square-root-16-how-many-answers-122","title":{"rendered":"sqrt(16) - how many answers?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a heated debate with some colleagues yesterday when I claimed that &radic;16 = 4. They were strongly advocating that there are 2 answers, &plusmn;4.<\/p>\n<p>I pointed out that there is a difference between this question:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Solve for <i>x<\/i>: <i style=\"margin-left:20px;\">x<\/i><sup>2<\/sup> = 16<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>and this question:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Evaluate <i>x<\/i>: <i style=\"margin-left:20px;\">x<\/i> = &radic;16.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The first has 2 solutions, the second has one answer.<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\">See the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/square-root-16-how-many-answers-122#comments\" id=\"comms\">39 Comments<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When we take a square root, does it have 1 or 2 answers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[129],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}