Rating: 
Summary: A smorgasbord for the mind
Review: This book is awesome! It seems as if Cliff Pickover has journeyed around the world to find unusual people and their fascinating magic squares, circles, stars, and other mathematical wonders. Topics include: Benjamin Franklin's "most magical" magic square, John Hendricks' four-dimensional magic tesseracts and other gems from prisoners, scientists, little-known artists, and computer programmers. Just last year, Pickover came across a wonderful collection of magic figures designed by the late, great Fubine. Fubine, whose real name was Cipriano Ferraris, died in 1958. Fubine's designs ranged from simple squares through a wide variety of linear geometric shapes and three-dimensional figures. Rows, columns, spokes, and diameters consisted of lines of numbers, no single one of which was repeated and whose totals were always the same. Pickover say that in 1929, Fubine lost all his money in the great stock market crash. He found himself in near suicidal state and distracted himself by creating ever-larger magic squares. What a smorgasbord for children, laypeople, and even seasoned mathematicians! In this book, you'll find information on magic square creation, classification, and history, and graphical representations that can be quite beautiful. The book contains math and art. Although, the literature on magic squares is vast, this book contains some magnificent structures discovered in the last few years. I don't think there is any other book that presents such a huge range of patterns.
Rating:
Summary: A smorgasbord for the mind
Review: This book is awesome! It seems as if Cliff Pickover has journeyed around the world to find unusual people and their fascinating magic squares, circles, stars, and other mathematical wonders. Topics include: Benjamin Franklin's "most magical" magic square, John Hendricks' four-dimensional magic tesseracts and other gems from prisoners, scientists, little-known artists, and computer programmers. Just last year, Pickover came across a wonderful collection of magic figures designed by the late, great Fubine. Fubine, whose real name was Cipriano Ferraris, died in 1958. Fubine's designs ranged from simple squares through a wide variety of linear geometric shapes and three-dimensional figures. Rows, columns, spokes, and diameters consisted of lines of numbers, no single one of which was repeated and whose totals were always the same. Pickover say that in 1929, Fubine lost all his money in the great stock market crash. He found himself in near suicidal state and distracted himself by creating ever-larger magic squares. What a smorgasbord for children, laypeople, and even seasoned mathematicians! In this book, you'll find information on magic square creation, classification, and history, and graphical representations that can be quite beautiful. The book contains math and art. Although, the literature on magic squares is vast, this book contains some magnificent structures discovered in the last few years. I don't think there is any other book that presents such a huge range of patterns.
Rating:
Summary: Diverse collection
Review: A magic square is an array of numbers in which the sums of numbers in rows, columns, and diagonals are equal. A magic square uses consecutive numbers from 1 to N. Here's an example,
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6
This book is different from all others I've seen on the subject, and I don't know any other books that present the large range of patterns that you'll find here. The book also focuses on discoveries in the last few years. As Pickover says, the book is essentially an exhibit of magnificent forms discovered through the centuries. All sorts of historical and quirky-human aspects are also described. Centuries ago, people believed that magic squares to had special, magical powers....
Rating:
Summary: Diverse collection
Review: A magic square is an array of numbers in which the sums of numbers in rows, columns, and diagonals are equal. A magic square uses consecutive numbers from 1 to N. Here's an example,
4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6
This book is different from all others I've seen on the subject, and I don't know any other books that present the large range of patterns that you'll find here. The book also focuses on discoveries in the last few years. As Pickover says, the book is essentially an exhibit of magnificent forms discovered through the centuries. All sorts of historical and quirky-human aspects are also described. Centuries ago, people believed that magic squares to had special, magical powers....
Rating:
Summary: A thousand hours of magical fun.
Review: If you love numbers, magic squares, geometry and mental calisthenics, read this book. It is the most complete source of information available on this topic and the author is exceedingly thorough and precise in his treatment of it. I was thrilled to discover new gems that I never knew existed before. As a result, a few extra neurons connected in my brain! That alone was worth the price of admission.
Rating:
Summary: A thousand hours of magical fun.
Review: If you love numbers, magic squares, geometry and mental calisthenics, read this book. It is the most complete source of information available on this topic and the author is exceedingly thorough and precise in his treatment of it. I was thrilled to discover new gems that I never knew existed before. As a result, a few extra neurons connected in my brain! That alone was worth the price of admission.
Rating:
Summary: What fun!
Review: OK, there were a couple of typos -- keeps you on your toes. Lots and lots of examples of different variations on the magic square theme -- and puzzles for the reader to solve. Some of those puzzles are quite easy and some are quite difficult and have yet to be solved by anyone. You can't be a mathphobe to read this book, but you don't need to be a math whiz either. Anybody who likes the challenge of a good crossword or crossnumber puzzle should like this.
Rating:
Summary: What fun!
Review: OK, there were a couple of typos -- keeps you on your toes. Lots and lots of examples of different variations on the magic square theme -- and puzzles for the reader to solve. Some of those puzzles are quite easy and some are quite difficult and have yet to be solved by anyone. You can't be a mathphobe to read this book, but you don't need to be a math whiz either. Anybody who likes the challenge of a good crossword or crossnumber puzzle should like this.
Rating:
Summary: The new reference book on magic squares !
Review: The book starts on a classical way, describing old french methods of magic construction : de la Loubère, Bachet de Méziriac, and de la Hire. But also other methods like Lee Fults, Strachey, diagonal, knight's move, lozenge,... In my point of view, the very very interesting parts are the 230 pages of chapters 2 and 3, the heart of the book.
Cliff explains and classifies the different and numerous magic objects according to their properties.
And you will find the state of the art about magic squares, magic cubes but also about magic objects using more than our current 3-dimensional space !
The excellent and recent work of John Hendricks, one of the world's main specialist on magic square, is oftenly presented and described. The end of the book describes very strange magic objects that will really astonish you : circles, spheres, stars, hexagons, flowers ( !), spider, ... An excellent book, THE NEW REFERENCE on the subject !
With a lot of figures, notes and references. My only regret is self-centred : my new record for multimagic squares were probably too recent to be in the book.
Cliff's book, page 136 : « A magic square is p-multimagic if the square formed by replacing each element by its kth power (for k=1, 2, ..., p) is also magic. As we discussed, a 2-multimagic square is called a bimagic square, and a 3-multimagic square is called a trimagic square. I do not know if a quadramagic or pentamagic square exists and welcome feedback from readers ».
So, feedback : both squares have been discovered in 2001. Our pentamagic square, 1024x1024 sized, is magic as far as the 5th power.
Cliff, I hope that the new record for multimagic squares, by André Viricel and Christian Boyer, will be in the next edition !
And you will probably have a next edition, I am sure that your book will be really successful.
Rating: 
Summary: an editor please
Review: This book contains print and mathematical errors. A cute book but because of the math misprints [I refuse to believe the author cannot add] a shoddy publication very uncharacteristic of Princeton
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