- How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number (quantamagazine.org)
The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of its diagonal couldn’t possibly be written as a fraction.
- Algenib (stars.astro.illinois.edu)
ALGENIB (Gamma Pegasi). Though the brightest star of Pegasus is Enif, the Epsilon star, the stars of the Great Square are of such obvious note that Bayer gave them Alpha through Delta. Delta (Alpheratz), the brightest, actually belongs to Andromeda as Alpha Andromedae, leaving Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Pegasi (Markab, Scheat, and Algenib) ranking 3-2-4 in the constellation and 2-1-3 in the Square, Algenib the faintest of them.
- Gamma Pegasi (Wikipedia)
Gamma Pegasi is a star in the constellation of Pegasus, located at the southeast corner of the asterism known as the Great Square. It has the formal name Algenib /ælˈdʒiːnɪb/; the Bayer designation Gamma Pegasi is Latinized from γ Pegasi and abbreviated Gamma Peg or γ Peg. The average apparent visual magnitude of +2.84 makes this the fourth-brightest star in the constellation. The distance to this star has been measured using the parallax technique, yielding a value of roughly 470 light-years (144 parsecs).
