in reply to Re: getting a cube root
in thread getting a cube root

You can use trig and brute force a method -- I'm a little busy to give it a go, but the complex roots lie on a circle in the complex plane of the same radius as the real root. With a cube root, that means you need to find the coords of the points at 120 and 240 degrees (1/3 and 2/3 around the circle) on that circle -- hopefully that's clear. For the nth root you need to look at the (i * 360/n) degree points with i = 0..(n-1). i=0 corresponds to the real root.

Update:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $twoPi = 4 * atan2(1, 0); for (2..5) { my @roots = nthRoots(8, $_); print "$_ th roots of 8: $/"; foreach my $root (@roots) { print "$root->{Real} $root->{Imag}$/"; } }; sub nthRoots { my $x = shift; my $n = shift; # Should check for integer powers my @roots; $roots[0] = { Real => $x ** (1/$n), Imag => 0 }; for (1..($n-1)) { push @roots, { Real => $roots[0]->{Real} * cos( $_ * $twoPi/$n ), Imag => $roots[0]->{Real} * sin( $_ * $twoPi/$n ) }; }; return @roots; }