Inspiring and Creative Resources & Tutorials for Science-Curious People
The neat magic square featured on this stamp was created by Brazilian mathematician Inder Taneja. This square, called IXOHOXI magic square, not only shows common properties like other magic squares, as well as being pandiagonal, but also include extra properties such as symmetries, rotations and reflections.
Indian mathematician Nārāyaṇa (1356) is the originator of the “Inscribed Lotus” (Padma Vrtta, a magic diagram constructed with the numbers of the 12×4 magic rectangle), in which every group of 12 numbers has the same sum 294.
A strange right-triangle involving the unit imaginary number i
The infamous problem of representing numbers with four 4’s appeared for the first time in 1881 in a London science journal. In 2001, a team of mathematicians from Harvey Mudd College found that we can even get four 4’s to approximate four notable constants: the number e, π, acceleration of gravity, and Avogadro’s number.
Maths à la De Funès…
For years, mathematicians have worked to demonstrate that x3+y3+z3 = k, where k is defined as the numbers from 1 to 100. This theory is true in all cases except for an unproven exception: 42.
By 2016 and over a million hours of computation later, researchers of the UK’s Advanced Computing Research Center had its solution for 42.
More intriguing number facts here.
3,139,971,973,786,634,711,391,448,651,577,269,485,891,759,419,122,938,744,591,877,656,925,789,747,974,914,319,422,889,611,373,939,731 produces reversible primes in each row, column and diagonal when distributed in a 10×10 square.
Diagram by HT Jens Kruse Andersen.
