Where is surds applied in real life situations?

Answer 1

Roots are needed to set up pallet specifications for shipments of goods, such as boxes of cereal or toilet paper. Consider contacting a packaging engineer at a company like General Mills or Kimberly Clark for more information. I believe they use programs that have the root calculations built in to do their individual work. But, the good engineers understand how the programs work and can provide on-the-spot feedback during cross-functional team meetings.

The task: You know the footprint area must be a rectangle made up by the base of the boxes that come off the assembly line, and need to know the length of each side of that rectangle. Square roots are needed to do determine the possible dimensions. Rarely are these integers or rational numbers. (Similarly, you know the area of the front/back face and the left/right sides and need to determine the possible dimensions.)

The challenge is to create a cube that most efficiently uses the volume in two or more types of transportation modules. For example, try to create a pallet specification that optimizes the use of shipping volume in both a semi trailer and an overseas shipping container.