On the roots of coquaternions

Abstract

In this paper we give a complete characterization of the nth roots of a coquaternion q. In particular, we show that the number and type of roots-isolated and/or hyperboloidal-depend on the nature of q, on the parity of n and (eventually) on the sign of the real part of q. We also show how the coquaternionic formalism can be used to obtain, in a simple manner, explicit expressions for the real nth roots of any 2 x 2 real matrix.