[simiones]

You may not think I'm right, but that is the actual history. This operation was invented at a time where geometry was the main way mathematics was done. The square root is a much older concept than negative numbers (edit: at least in the Hellenistic world; Chinese and Indian mathematics may have had different histories).

So, by definition, the square root of 4 is +2. x * x = 4 has two solutions, which we dub +sqrt(2) and -sqrt(2).

Edit: to discuss just how much older, the concept of a square root appears in Euclid's Elements, c. 300 BC; on the other hand, Diophantus, in Arithmetica, c. 280 AD, was claiming that the equation 4x + 20 = 4 doesn't have any solutions/is absurd. So, the square root is more than 600 years older than negative numbers in the Hellenistic tradition.

[mannerheim]

The negative root is also a square root, but it isn't the root denoted by the radical symbol.

But anyway, when talking about THE nth root, we're almost always talking about the principal root.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34441863

[thaumasiotes]

> Diophantus, in Arithmetica, c. 280 AD, was claiming that the equation 4x + 20 = 4 doesn't have any solutions/is absurd. So, the square root is more than 600 years older than negative numbers in the Hellenistic tradition.

The gap is much wider than that; double-entry bookkeeping speaks of "credit" and "debit" (defined to be exactly the same concept as positive and negative numbers) because negative numbers were still nearly unknown to Europeans in the 15th century.