author
Best known for the wonderfully odd The Square Root of 4 to a Million Places, this elusive author turns a simple mathematical fact into a playful endurance piece. Very little biographical information is publicly available, which only adds to the book’s curiosity.
by Norman L. De Forest
Norman L. De Forest is credited as the creator of The Square Root of 4 to a Million Places, a work preserved by Project Gutenberg. In the text itself, he explains that it presents more than one million digits of the square root of 4, generated with a custom utility on a standard IBM PC.
Publicly available information about De Forest appears to be extremely limited. Project Gutenberg lists only this one work under the name, and major book sites also mainly point back to the same title rather than offering a fuller biography.
That scarcity makes the book stand out even more: it feels like a small, eccentric publishing artifact from the early web era, mixing computation, humor, and sheer determination in a way readers are unlikely to forget.