Mathematics | Backyard Sketches

Posts Tagged ‘Mathematics’

Testing a LaTeX plugin for the ol' blog!

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

So I’m doing a little revision because it turns out, hey, I suck at Maths, and I stumble on this one; for the record, I am growing quite a hatred for roots. It might seem simple, and I did figure it out in the end, I think (!), but it’d be interesting to see a decent explanation for it rather that, this equals this so this is that and yeah

$h^{2}=\frac{3}{4}$

$h=\sqrt{\frac{3}{4}}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}$

I absolutely, totally get that $h=\sqrt{\frac{3}{4}}$ but why is that simplified further to $\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}$ ?! Without going downstairs to look at the exercise again, I think the purpose was to simplify the root so it could be calculated by hand. I figure, however, that if you don’t know the square root of 0.75, then you won’t know the square root of three divided by two either?! ¹