The first time I was in school for electrical engineering (long story), I had a professor who had never worked in the industry. I was in her class and the topic of the day was measuring AC waveforms.
Square-root-calculating circuits find wide use in instrumentation and measurement systems for such tasks as calculating the rms (root-mean-square) value of an arbitrary waveform, for example. Hence, ...
If Mr. Murphy of “Murphy's Law” fame [1] had been a mathematician he would have had a warning something along the lines of: “Beware of Square Root of 2 errors ...