From: "Jan E." <lists@...>
Date: 2012-12-05T20:51:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Vectors & Surds in Ruby

Nuggety Nanna wrote in post #1087904:
> As for the surds, I am finding the square root of a set of values, and
> want the answer as an exact value, rather than a float.

Then you have to use symbolic calculations with custom square root
objects. Something like the Rational class for doing exact calculations
with rational numbers. You cannot use floating point methods like
Math.sqrt().

See if you find a library, I'm pretty this has already been done. If you 
do a lot of advanced math, it might also be a good idea to outsource the 
calculations to a computer algebra system like Axiom and use Ruby only 
for getting the user input and displaying the result:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system)

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