[Arnt]

AOL. It's like the articles that would explain how unix software by explaining in detail how to ./configured;make;make install and leave out everything specific to the software in question.

I can explain one small part, though. A lot of these things need some fixed constants that have to be not all-zero, not all-one, not easily predictable and not someone's backdoor. So people will say things like "we need five ten-digit numbers here, so we'll use the second to eleventh digits of the square roots of the first five primes".

That is, the use of the square root has nothing to do with being the square root of two, there's no deep math. The square root of two is just some number that you won't suspect of being a backdoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number