### Simple Ways to Compute Square Root

Here are some methods to compute the square root of a positive number $c$. Nothing innovative; but classic.

### Method 1: Taylor expansion

If $c>1$, then

$\sqrt{c}=\sqrt{\frac{1}{1-q}}=1+\frac{1}{2}q+\frac{3}{8}q^2+\cdots+(-1)^n{-1/2 \choose n}q^n+\cdots$

If $c<1$, then

$\sqrt{c}=\sqrt{1-q}=1-\frac{1}{2}q+\frac{3}{8}q^2+\cdots+(-1)^n{1/2 \choose n}q^n+\cdots$

Convergence: linear.

### Method 2: Fixed point iteration

$x_{n+1}\leftarrow\frac{1}{2}\left(x_n+\frac{c}{x_n}\right)$

### Method 3: Fixed point iteration

$x_{n+1}\leftarrow\dfrac{x_n(x_n^2+3c)}{3x_n^2+c}$

Convergence: cubic.

#### 3 Responses to “Simple Ways to Compute Square Root”

1. 1 nenny March 2, 2010 at 3:14 pm

thank you for this post.. this helps me a lot.. really.. thanks..! 😀

2. 2 Frank April 17, 2010 at 11:40 pm

Hi,

I want to plot a implicit function on matlab, would you please let me know the commands?

Here is the function:

k=[x-k]x/[3x-2k]+[2x-3k][1-x]/[1-x-k]

x in (0,1)

Thanks a lot.

3. 3 Jie April 19, 2010 at 8:27 pm

Frank, you can do this:

xm = 0:0.01:1;
km = 0:0.01:4;
[x,k] = meshgrid(xm,km);
f = (x-k).*x./(3*x-2*k)+(2*x-3*k).*(1-x)./(1-x-k) – k;
contour(x,k,f,[0,0]);