Bernard Frénicle de Bessy

Bernard Frénicle de Bessy (ca. 1605-1670), born in Paris, wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics. The Frénicle standard form, a standard representation of magic squares, is named after him.

In 1693, he described all 880 essentially different normal magic squares of order 4.

He challenged Christiaan Huygens to solve the following system of equations in integers,

<math>x^2+y^2=z^2,x^2=u^2+v^2,x-y=u-v<math>

A solution was given by M. Pépin in 1880.

This article is based on a public domain article from Rouse History of Mathematics.