Bernard Frénicle de Bessy [SEP] native language
Bernard Frénicle de Bessy
Bernard Frénicle de Bessy (c. 1604 – 1674), was a French mathematician born in Paris, who wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics. He is best remembered for , a treatise on magic squares published posthumously in 1693, in which he described all 880 essentially different normal magic squares of order 4. The Frénicle standard form, a standard representation of magic squares, is named after him. He solved many problems created by Fermat and also discovered the cube property of the
Frénicle standard form
A magic square is in the Frénicle standard form, named for Bernard Frénicle de Bessy, if the following two conditions hold:
1. the element at position [1,1] (top left corner) is the smallest of the four corner elements; and
2. the element at position [1,2] (top edge, second from left) is smaller than the element in [2,1].
In 1693, Frénicle described all the 880 essentially different order-4 magic squares.
Properties.