Chinese 12TET - overkill?

It's been an interesting discussion on whether or not Prince Tsai-Yu
could have done the math....

>>About 1595, Prince Tsai-Yu" calculated the 12th roots of 2 to 9 significant
>>figures on a fundamental of 1,000,000,000.
>>
>>--John
>
>That's hard to believe.

Nope. All posters I've seen seemed to have missed a simple solution:
all that is needed to calculate the 12th or any other root is
multiplication and some time. Successive approximation might seem like
a tedious method in this day and age, but 12 multiplications will tell
you if you're close - and 12 more will tell you if your next guess is
closer or not.

--
Johnny Klonaris / HP/ISD 101T, 1266 Kifer Road, Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Phone: (hp telnet)/(408) 746-5465 | "Patriotism is often an arbitrary
email: johnny@ptp.hp.com | veneration of real estate above
CIS: 75036,1351 | principles." - George Jean Nathan

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