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Magic squares and Grobner bases.

Student-Run Research Seminar

Speaker: Maya Ahmed, UC Davis
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Wed, May 9 2001, 12:10PM

A magic square is a square matrix such that the row and the column sums are all the same. A Famous example is a 4x4 magic square which appears in a well-known engraving 'Melancholia' by Albrecht Durer: 16 3 2 13 5 10 11 8 9 6 7 12 4 15 14 1 The row and column sums in this array all equal 34. In this talk we will try to look at the question: Given numbers N and S how many NxN magic squares are there such that the column and row sums are all S? It is a hard question in general. In this talk I will show how to derive a formula for 3x3 magic squares using Grobner bases.