Magic Square, Math, Recreational, Luo Shu Square, Lo Shu, 洛书

Last crawled date: 6 years, 2 months ago

Magic Square

The Magic Square has a Chinese origin and has for long been used in both school and recreational mathematics. It is simple and engaging: Consider the numbers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}. How can we arrange them to a square so that the sum of the three numbers along each row, each column, and each diagonal are all the same? As a warm up, one can ask children to add up the following: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 =? There are of course many different ways to add up the numbers! There are certainly magic squares of different orders! As the square gets bigger, however, it quickly gets too complicated for school children.

Although we can use paper and pencil work to play with the magic square, a physical model changes the mode of exploration and may encourage children’s math talks and pattern making or tweaking.

Two sizes: 64mm^2, and 100mm^2 .

References:

Magic Square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square

Weisstein, Eric W. "Magic Square." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MagicSquare.html

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244015585828