Sunday 8 November 2009

The Magic Square

I took a break from revision today after noon by constructing a 19 x 19 magic square. It turned out to be the most beautiful thing I created by hand. Behold!





















It has numbers from 1 to 361 and it took exactly 20 minutes to build. That was better than I had expected. After all, I had to fill up the matrix so that each row column and diagonal gave a sum of  3439.
If you refuse to believe it I invite you to download the picture, enlarge it and utilize a calculator (or your brain) calculate the sum.

5 comments:

Srikanth said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Srikanth said...

We all have our hobbies. Right now mine is creating exceptional functions and trying to apply them for coding or language translation.

Ashwin Narayan said...

Well, why don't you send me an email with those functions?
I love making functions too. Especially with a lot of logs and trigonometrical functions inside them.

And have you heard of the Riemann Zeta Function and it's central importance in the distribution of prime numbers?

Srikanth said...

I have heard of Riemann but not the function.

Ashwin Narayan said...

The Riemann Zeta function is perhaps the most important function in pure mathematics. It is also a complex function which means it accepts complex numbers(of the form a + bi where i=(-1)^0.5. This is part of a branch of math called complex analysis.)

This wonderful function also gives rise to what could perhaps be the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics. The problem is called the Riemann Hypothesis. It states that The real part of any non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 0.5. hus the non-trivial zeros should lie on the so-called critical line, 0.5 + it, where t is a real number and i is the imaginary unit.

I am sorry to say that this problem remains o be proved or disproved. This problem is so important that the Clay Mathematics Institute has classified it as a Millennium prize
Problem and is offering anybody who solves it a prize of 1 million US Dollars.