Good Morning Blog

Good Morning. This is the second post in a series about topics that have traditionally not been handled honestly in Mathematics classroom. The first post was about adding and subtracting fractions .  In this post I would like to address two aspects of square roots that are often treated with less precision than they ought to be; square roots of negative numbers and simplifying square roots. To better understand both of these issues, it is important to have a clear understanding of what is meant when we say that a is the square root of b . We mean that a times a is equal to b . More precisely, . Square Roots of Negative Numbers When students first learn about square roots, they generally have only worked with the set of Real numbers; natural numbers, whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, and irrational numbers. The collection of all of these numbers is called the Real numbers. But "real" in this sense has nothing to do with these numbers existing and other numbers not