Check to find the ‘power’ button on your own calculator. This is particularly useful when the index number is large. The square root of \({16}\) is \({4}\) (because \(4^2 = 4 \times 4 = 16\)).

[MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of two or 1.41421. How did they know that?

Making life simpler, [nats.fr] settled on a gamma of two, which means taking a bunch of square roots, which isn’t fast on an FPGA. [nats]’s algorithm is pretty neat: it uses a first-stage ...