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 The Square Root of TwoAlso known as Pythagoras' constant, the square root of 2 is a positive real number that, when multiplied by itself, results in the number 2. Though perhaps less well known than pi, the square root of 2 was probably the first known irrational number—a real number that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers—and approximations of it have been found on an ancient Babylonian tablet and in ancient Indian texts. To how many decimal places has the value of the square root of 2 been calculated? More...
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I didn't need to jump through hoops to determine that the square root of 2 is irrational; I just didn't know what to call it at the time, since I was quite young. I just knew that 0x0=0, 1x1=1, 2x2=4,..., so the only way to get a terminated number was to have 0 as the last decimal, but that would mean that some other digit had to be next-to-last, which couldn't have returned 0 when multiplied by itself. Too bad a lot of the rest of maths didn't come so easy to me.
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This number is much older than pi? I did not know that.
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I'm having flashbacks to high school math class. 
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