Highly multimagic squares: heptamagic, octamagic, and more...


In 2001, the most multimagic squares, known at that time, were the tetra and pentamagic squares (=4 and 5-multimagic) that I constructed with André Viricel. In 2003, Pan Fengchu constructed a hexamagic square (=6-multimagic) of order 4096 = 212. From 2004 to 2006, several new researches improved the multimagic records:

If I summarize all the new announced results, independently found:

As I wrote in 2001 in my Pour La Science paper, page 101 (PDF file downloadable from the Bibliography page), the described "Viricel-Boyer" method used for the first tetra and pentamagic squares should be able to construct hexamagic, heptamagic, octamagic, and so on... up to any multimagic level, but with the need to increase sufficiently the size (= the order) of the square... and with the need to use a good computer program to check the squares... I am also sure, without having the proof, that the good old "Tarry-Cazalas" method is also able to create n-multimagic squares for any n.

Pierre Tougne used the two French methods. For example he constructed his heptamagic and octamagic squares with the Viricel-Boyer method, and the following keys:

Pan Fengchu, China, also constructed numerous highly multimagic squares. I have not personally checked any of these huge squares announced by PF or PT.

In 2005, Harm Derksen (University of Michigan, USA), Christian Eggermont and Arno van den Essen (University of Nijmegen, Netherlands) wrote the first draft of a very interesting paper available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/math.CO/0504083. They proved mathematically that it is always possible to construct an n-multimagic square for any n. A very important theorem, supposed for a long time, announced by Gaston Tarry in 1906, but now proved!

However, the DEvdE method needs very big orders: for example, if we compare the heptamagic squares, their order 13^7 = 62,748,517 is approximatively one thousand times bigger than the order 2^16 = 65,536 used by Pierre Tougne and Pan Fengchu. I have not checked their heptamagic or higher squares: the squares should be correct because they are theoretically proved correct. But I asked Christian Eggermont to send me a trimagic square of the smallest possible order = 5^3 = 125 constructed with their method. I confirm that the received square has all the announced trimagic properties. An interesting fact, I noted that the Tarry-Cazalas method can be used to generate exactly the same square, with exactly the same cells.

DEvdE proved that a n-multimagic square of order pn exists for any prime p ≥ 2n − 1 with n ≥ 3. This result is improved with n=2 (bimagic squares) by Yong Zhang, Kejun Chen (Yancheng Teachers University, Jiangsu, China), and Jianguo Lei (Hebei Normal University, Hebei, China). In their paper "Large sets of orthogonal arrays and multimagic squares" published in the Journal of Combinatorial Designs, Vol.21, Issue 9, September 2013, pages 390-403 (but first published online in December 2012), they proved with their theorem 1.2:

Jaroslaw Wroblewski (Wroclaw University, Poland) also worked on the subject of highly multimagic squares. Using Mathematica, he constructed a 10-multimagic square (=decamagic ≥square) of order 2^29, bigger than the order 2^28 used by Pierre Tougne or Pan Fengchu, but with a supplemental property: its 2^29 columns are 11-multimagic.


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