Abstract: In this talk I will give the antiquated "longhand" method of deriving the square root of a real number. This is an old-timers trick that one cannot usually find in books written after about 1950 at best (thanks to modern technology it has gone the way of a curiosity from the past).

In this talk I will give the algorithm for doing this (and at least an indication of why it works. We will use this parlor trick to generate some examples (and use the idea to show how to derive cube roots and higher). This technique will be compared to some other techniques of finding square roots and compare it with our resurrected method.

This talk should be quite understandable and hopefully interesting to all.