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This Magic Square website shows how the abundance of Magic Squares can sometimes be reduced to a few underlying patterns. It is dedicated to my father E.B. Grogono (1909 - 1999) and much of it was created at his bedside during his final illness. My fondest memories of him center on his ability to transmit his love for, and fascination with, mathematics and science.
A Magic square is intriguing; its complexity challenges the mind. For order 4 and above the number of different magic squares is astonishing - and the number remains large even if we limit consideration to Regular Pan-Magic squares. This website presents techniques that reduce the huge numbers to a much smaller number of underlying patterns or Magic Carpets.
Do it yourself! This allows you to Make your own magic square of any size up to 97x97.
If you want to check on the meaning of the terms used on this website, please review the Glossary
The Main focus of this website is Regular Pan-Magic squares where even the broken diagonals add up to the Magic Sum, e.g., 60 in the square above (diagonal 13, 2, 16, 5, 24). Pan-magic squares have also been called Pan-Diagonal and Nasik. All these squares are based on regular underlying patterns.
A best answer is that it allows all the Component squares to start at zero. This is particularly useful when the Magic Carpet approach is used to analyze or construct a magic square, e.g., to construct an order four magic square, four magic Components would be required using: 8 & 0; 4 & 0; 2 & 0; and 1 & 0.
I am frequently asked to provide a Formula for Magic Squares. At the risk of spoiling some teacher's classwork assignments I have worked out a satisfactory answer and have devoted a page to this topic. (Thank you Danny Lawrence for making me do this and for sitting with me while I worked it out.) Two formulae are included, one for the prime-number orders, e.g., 5, 7, 11, 13, etc., and one for an order 4 square.
My fascination with magic squares grew from experimental attempts to count the total number of possible squares when squares which, apparently different, were really identical when appropriately reflected or rotated. A separate page lists the Number of Pan-Magic Squares for the Prime Number Order squares.
The process of counting and comparing regular panmagic squares generated a need to identify squares to facilitate ranking and comparison. Out of this grew a scoring system to uniquely identify any order 4 or order 5 pan-magic square.
The method I developed assigns a Unique Identifier to each square and is applicable to regular panmagic squares of orders 4 and 5. It depends on summing defined cells which have been multiplied by successively higher powers of the square's order. Although the technique could be extended to larger squares, the length of the expression, and the resulting magnitude of the numbers, makes it too unwieldy.
If you have found this website useful, you are invited to visit one of my other teaching sites.
Two of these other sites are mounted on my main website but all three are treated as an independent website:
This website is aimed at yachtsmen, scouts, climbers, fishermen and anyone else who needs to know how to tie Animated Knots by Grog. Each animated knot "ties itself" automatically and can also be "tied" and "untied" slowly to reveal its structure.
This website is aimed at Restaurants, Clubs, Caterers, as well as your Home. Animated Napkins by Grog shows each napkin "folding itself" automatically. Choose from forty designs to suit your purpose.
This website is aimed at physicians, physiologists, medical students, nurses, and other health care professionals. The Acid-Base Tutorial includes interactive diagrams and equations to make the material more interesting and more readily understood.
This website demonstrates how a vivid three-dimensional stereo image is created from a repeated stereo image pair. A collection of Stereo Art Images illustrates the technique.
| Copyright © Mar 2010 | Magic Squares Website |
Updated Mar 6, 2010 |