Roots in operator and Banach algebras

We show that several known facts concerning roots of matrices generalize to operator algebras and Banach algebras. We show for example that the so-called Newton, binomial, Visser, and Halley iterative methods converge to the root in Banach and operator algebras under various mild hypotheses. We also show that the `sign' and `geometric mean' of matrices generalize to Banach and operator algebras, and we investigate their properties. We also establish some other facts about roots in this setting.