If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Background: I was working through a math problem with a friend and I offhandedly said something like "(-8)^(1/3) is better known as -2". Which he insisted was wrong, somehow. Wolfram Alpha did not help since if you type that in it gives you one of the complex ones as the primary answer, though it does give -2 if you type "cube root of -8" instead. The context was actually expressing all the roots of x³ + 8 by taking one and multiplying it by roots of unity, so it made no difference which was picked as the "primary" root anyway...
That said, the TI-89 also has solve and cSolve functions. "solve(x^3=8,x)" produces "x=-2", regardless of complex format, and "cSolve(x^3=-8,x)" produces "x=1-sqrt(3)*i or x=1+sqrt(3)*i or x=-2", again regardless of complex format.
I think the issue is that fractional exponents are interpreted as root functions, and root functions are generally interpreted as producing the real (and positive, if possible) roots. Whereas simply asking "what are the roots" will more validly be answered with complex answers.
Also, I don't like that HH doesn't like us.
There are a few (I can think of two; I won't name) specific people who left here and only hang out there, but that's not really the same as the entire site.
Panurge on HH was using that avatar earlier, but not green.