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Suggestion for unlimited-precision integer roots

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Subject: Suggestion for unlimited-precision integer roots
From: kevinogo...@gmail.com (Kevin O'Gorman)
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by: Kevin O'Gorman - Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:51 UTC

I have developed a Python program that computes integer roots to unlimited precision. At the time, I was not even aware of python decimal package, so it works on strings for non-integer inputs (but still only integer roots of them). Internally it uses Python's native unlimited precision integers.

Anyway, It occurs to me this could be useful in the decimal package -- and maybe elsewhere as well.

The code is in https://github.com/kogorman/pyroot, and is intended for public consumption.

If there's already a Python feature that does this, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

I developed this because I kept remembering a grade-school teacher who taught us how to extract square roots -- and that he commented that there was no similar paper-and-pencil way to extract higher roots. Then, as it happens, 7 decades later or so, I was looking at the details of the square-root method to see what made it work, and I saw that it was based on the formula for (a+b)**2 -- the usual binomial formula. It seemed obvious that higher-valued binomials could also be used, and that's how it worked out. I've tested very large values of the root -- in the thousands -- and verified that the results work.

Subject	Author
Suggestion for unlimited-precision integer roots	Kevin O'Gorman