And they had some basic guys memorized like

So, if they needed a decimal value for a guy like

they'd put in the memorized 1.414 part and crunch it out by hand:

Not very accurate either.  My calculator says

So...  What if they needed to crunch this guy?

Well...  might be too big for the tables and, even though they were geeks, I'm sure they couldn't have memorized ALL the radicals.

So, what did they do?

They rewrote the radical so that the smallest number possible was inside the radical.