MAGIC SQUARES

Jeroen Hellingman jhelling at cs.ruu.nl
Mon Feb 8 16:55:07 UTC 1993


Hi,

I have done some research on the field of magically filled hexagons
(i.e. that yield an equal sum in all three directions), and am very
much interested in references to such things in Indian mythology/tradition.
Also the other material (about magic squares and stars) has my interest.
Can you please send me more about this subject.

The Hexagons are interesting to me since there is only one way to fill
a hexagonal grid of 19 cells with the numbers 1...19 in a 'magical'
way. Larger hexagonal grids cannot be filled in a magical way with
the numbers 1..n (for n = 37, 61, ...), as is easy to prove. A way out
is using numbers from other intervals. I have made magical arrangements
for 37-cell grids with the numbers 3...39. I wonder whether such things
have been done in ancient India, since it costed me several days of 
computer time to get it right, and I was not able to find any pattern
in it.

(for those interesting, a publication about this is somewhere in the
process of going to a magazine... but it has nothing to do with indology)

Jeroen

-- 
Jeroen Hellingman                 E-mail: <jhelling at cs.ruu.nl>
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