- GIRTAB (Theta Scorpii). Girtab, Bayer’s Theta star within Scorpius, the celestial scorpion, stands out in almost any way you can look at it. The name alone is unusual, in that it comes to us from Sumerian rather than Arabic or Greek, and means simply “the scorpion.”
- The name Girtab is also used by Kappa Scorpii. This Girtab refers specifically to Theta Scorpii, known as Sargas.
- 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.