Magic Square - Sixty Symbols

well yes I think we fun to talk a little bit about magic squares and magic squares have fascinated mathematicians and artists as well for many hundreds of years and I'd like to show you just a print that's called melancholia won by a German artist and in this you can see a rather plump melancholy angel with various mathematical devices she's holding a pair of compasses in her hand there's this complex geometrical object here this is sphere down here and then various tools and objects and also we can see a wonderful comment and a rainbow time is passing and up in the top-right right-hand corner we have a magic square and if we zoom in on this it's written in slightly old-fashioned symbols but somewhere okay so this is written out in in modern versions of the numerals the magic square that appears in Duras painting of melancholia one and if you if you look at this you'll see that all of the rows so this row if you have those numbers up 16 plus 3 plus 2 plus 13 hours up to 13 434 and if we look down this column here 13 3 plus 10 plus 6 plus 15 that adds up to 34 and then if you look along the diagonal if I remember correctly that's 26 and then that's also 34 and this diagonal is also 34 and we've got a four by four square here notice and we've used the first 16 numbers to fill that Square and that's your typical Magic Square now this one really fascinates me I've got it hanging up at home and I was looking at it one day a couple of weeks ago in fact and I severed something that I've never seen before and I've looked around on on Wikipedia and not not seen any reference to it but if you add all the numbers in melancholia so if you add all the numbers of the Magic Square and we've seen that each College of the four columns as 34 so if we take four times 34 we get 100 thirty-six and then if we look for one more number in melancholia it's called melancholia one and if I add one to 136 I get 137 and this is approximately he cooked - what about alpha my friend the fine-structure constant which tells us the ratio of the strength of the electrical force to the quantum how you suggested is something some some meaningless no no is purely coincidence but I think it's purely coincidence but it's where I think it's very funny and it's not very widely known so I I'd be great if we can put it in sixty symbols and doo-doo-doo words squares yeah I mean I've been fascinated with these things since I've been a kid and I played around seeing if I could make them and I started off with a nice simple odd 3 by 3 number squares and I wanted to try make all the rows and columns add up and I think this the rather plump angel here just looks like a physicist and she's obviously worried about infinities or or integer numbers or the volume of this and thinking about spheres or maybe she's seen this comment on the rainbow wondering about it it's just delight to a physicist to see it so I find them she looks very patient just thinking where the problems and that's what we have to do and when we get a bit melancholic and depressed we have to press on with our calculations and do our experiments so I find it just inspiring

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 162,434

Rating: 4.9381089 out of 5

Keywords: magic, square

Id: gGvyeuDT2Do

Length: 3min 39sec (219 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2009