Slashdot Mirror
Ancient Puzzle Gets New Lease on 'Geomagical' Life
techbeat writes "An ancient mathematical puzzle has found a new lease on life, reports New Scientist. The magic square is the basis for Sudoku, pops up on the back of a turtle in Chinese legend and provides a playful way to introduce children to arithmetic. But all this time it has been concealing a more complex geometrical form, says recreational mathematician Lee Sallows. He recently released dozens of examples of his 'geomagic squares' online. 'To come up with this after thousands of years of study of magic squares is pretty amazing,' blogged author Alex Bellos. Magic squares are used to help create codes for transmitting information and in the design of drug trials so geomagic ones may have real-world uses, says mathematician Peter Cameron. New Scientist has also put up a gallery of the geomagic squares."
It was no ordinary turtle. It is called a dragon turtle which is huge in size with a dragon head: http://www.kunde.org.tw/image3/01-book-032.jpg
Legend said that it carried strange messages on its shell. The messages looked simple (as you can see in the picture above) but people later found the complex meanings behind them.
This messages are the building blocks of most numerologies in ancient China, including Fengshui and I-Ching.
This is one of the most famous OPA (Out of Place Artifact) in China history.
Sounds suspicious. Oh I bet it's 'perfectly safe', but you start out on math and who knows where you'll end up? Smoking crack out of rolled up nonstandard analysis theorems in a gutter in cambridge? It's a gateway drug, I tell ya.
By 3.3^3, they mean 3 x 3^3, not (3.3)^3. It's an unfortunate use of the period symbol to denote multiplication because standard keyboards do not have the centered dot symbol.
Yes, but they want to express it as 3.3^3 to bring out the relationship with a 3.3 shape (ie, a square). (You are reading "3.3" as "3 multiplied by 3", aren't you?)
I went to the site to find out what geomagic squares are, but by the time I reached the end of the summary I completely lost interest.
Oh no, not his writing style. Fucking idiot - look at his gallery, its actually very clever and not everyone can afford a writing staff to get past the crap filter on morons like you (which I assume is a self-feeding mechanism, as you keep getting spoon fed BS by such filters throughout your life you will only ever know such). Swearing for your benefit in hopes to publicly degrade you while making you stop reading at the first line.
Ah, because they want to emphasize the fact that the "sum" of the figures in a given row, column, or diagonal is a 3x3x3 cube, and thus the total number of cubic units is three times the sum of a single row/column, or 3 x 3^3, which in turn is the sum of the nine consecutive odd integers from 1 to 17, which form the individual entries of the geomagical square.
Some of the best comments I've ever read on /. were by ACs. Just sayin' :)