Bernard Frénicle de Bessy, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetBernard Frénicle de Bessy
French mathematician
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Paris, Île-de-France, France
About Bernard Frénicle de Bessy
- Bernard Frénicle de Bessy (c.
- 1604 – 1674), was a French mathematician born in Paris, who wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics.
- He is best remembered for Des quarrez ou tables magiquescode: fra promoted to code: fr , a treatise on magic squares published posthumously in 1693, in which he described all 880 essentially different normal magic squares of order 4.
- The Frénicle standard form, a standard representation of magic squares, is named after him.
- He solved many problems created by Fermat and also discovered the cube property of the number 1729 (Ramanujan number), later referred to as a taxicab number.
- He is also remembered for his treatise Traité des triangles rectangles en nombres published in 1676. Bessy was a member of many of the scientific circles of his day, including the French Academy of Sciences, and corresponded with many prominent mathematicians, such as Mersenne and Pascal.
- Bessy was also particularly close to Fermat, Descartes and Wallis, and was best known for his insights into number theory. He challenged Christiaan Huygens to solve the following system of equations in integers, x2 + y2 = z2, x2 = u2 + v2, x - y = u - v.A solution was given by Théophile Pépin in 1880.
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