# Inverse Square Roots

As in the [internet-draft], the decaf377 functions are defined in terms of the following function, which computes the square root of a ratio of field elements, with the special behavior that if the input is nonsquare, it returns the square root of a related field element, to allow reuse of the computation in the hash-to-group setting.

• TODO: actually specify this procedure.

Fix as 2841681278031794617739547238867782961338435681360110683443920362658525667816. Then is a nonsquare -th root of unity.

• TODO: possibly change this value to be convenient for implementations, rather than something that’s convenient for SAGE;

Define sqrt_ratio_zeta(u,v) as:

• (True, ) if and are nonzero, and is square;
• (True, ) if is zero;
• (False, ) if is zero;
• (False, ) if and are nonzero, and is nonsquare.

Since is nonsquare, if is nonsquare, is square. Note that unlike the similar function in the ristretto255/decaf448 [internet-draft], this function does not make any claims about the sign of its output.

• TODO: describe efficient implementation using 2020/1407