Any number raised to the power of 2 can be modeled using a polygon--the square! That's why we call raising a number to the second power "squaring the number." The perfect squares are squares of whole numbers. Here are the first five perfect squares.

We've shown a geometric model to verify each of these squares. The square root of a number n is a number that, when multiplied by itself, equals n. Here are the square roots of the perfect squares above.

This model shows the number 169 as a square. From the model, what is the square root of 169? We can count the number of units making up each side of the square. We find 13 units to a side, so 13 is the square root of 169.

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