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Humanity's love affair with mathematics and mysticism reached a critical juncture, legend has it, on the back of a turtle in ancient China. As Clifford Pickover briefly recounts in this enthralling book, the most comprehensive in decades on magic squares, Emperor Yu was supposedly strolling along the Yellow River one day around 2200 B.C. when he spotted the creature: its shell had a series of dots within squares. To Yu's amazement, each row of squares contained fifteen dots, as did the columns and diagonals. When he added any two cells opposite along a line through the center square, like 2 and 8, he always arrived at 10. The turtle, unwitting inspirer of the ''Yu'' square, went on to a life of courtly comfort and fame. Pickover explains why Chinese emperors, Babylonian astrologer-priests, prehistoric cave people in France, and ancient Mayans of the Yucatan were convinced that magic squares--arrays filled with numbers or letters in certain arrangements--held the secret of the universe. Since the dawn of civilization, he writes, humans have invoked such patterns to ward off evil and bring good fortune. Yet who would have guessed that in the twenty-first century, mathematicians would be studying magic squares so immense and in so many dimensions that the objects defy ordinary human contemplation and visualization? Readers are treated to a colorful history of magic squares and similar structures, their construction, and classification along with a remarkable variety of newly discovered objects ranging from ornate inlaid magic cubes to hypercubes. Illustrated examples occur throughout, with some patterns from the author's own experiments. The tesseracts, circles, spheres, and stars that he presents perfectly convey the age-old devotion of the math-minded to this Zenlike quest. Number lovers, puzzle aficionados, and math enthusiasts will treasure this rich and lively encyclopedia of one of the few areas of mathematics where the contributions of even nonspecialists count.
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ...the result, but it is not probable that he derived his square according to the scheme employed here. Our 16X16 square is not exactly the same as the square of Franklin, but it belongs to the same class. Our method gives the key to the construction, and it is understood that the system here represented will allow us to construct many more squares by simply pushing the square beyond its limits into the opposite row which by this move has to be transferred. There is the same relation between Franklin's 16X16 square and our square constructed by alternation with quaternate transposition, that exists between the corresponding 8X8 squares. REFLECTIONS ON MAGIC SQUARES. MATHEMATICS, especially in the field where it touches philosophy, has always been my foible, and so Mr. W. S. Andrews's article on "Magic Squares" tempted me to seek a graphic key to the interrelation among their figures which should reveal at a glance the mystery of their construction. THE ORDER OF FIGURES. In odd magic squares, 3X3, 5X5, 7X7, etc., there is no difficulty whatever, as Mr. Andrews's diagrams show at a glance (Fig. 213). The consecutive figures run up slantingly in the form of a staircase, so as to let the next higher figure pass over into the next higher or lower cell of the next row, and those figures that according to this method would fall outside of the square, revert into it as if the magic square were for the time (at the moment of crossing its boundary) connected with its opposite side into the shape of a cylinder. This cannot be clone at once with both its two opposite vertical and its two opposite horizontal sides, but the process is easily represented in the plane by having the magic square extended on all its sides, and on passing its limits...
"The Magic of Math is the math book you wish you had in school. Using a delightful assortment of examples--from ice cream scoops and poker hands to measuring mountains and making magic squares--this book empowers you to see the beauty, simplicity, and truly magical properties behind those formulas and equations that once left your head spinning. You'll learn the key ideas of classic areas of mathematics like arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, but you'll also have fun fooling around with Fibonacci numbers, investigating infinity, and marveling over mathematical magic tricks that will make you look like a math genius!"--