My second talk will not be a continuation of sudoku, however it will be on something similar called magic squares. Recalling from last talk Latin squares of 3×3 dimension make up the 9×9 sudoku board where no number is repeated in any column or row or square. A magic square is similar in that it is an arrangement of numbers (usually integers) in a square grid, where the numbers in each row, and in each column, and the numbers that run diagonally in both directions, all add up to the same number. It also has nxn or n^2 dimensions only. I will discuss further the history as well as methods to construct some.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square
This is the article I used last time for the sudoku: The Science behind SUDOKU, BY JEAN-PAUL DELAHAYE, Scientific American, June 2006.
Link: http://www.lifl.fr/~delahaye/dnalor/SudokuSciam2006.pdf
Very nice second talk. I especially enjoyed the fact you brought a problem with the magic squares to our attention and it was something that we could investigate on our own. It was an interesting topic and was kind of part of the “fun” side of math that I enjoy a lot of the times. Well done!
I also enjoyed the topics of both of your talks I have been doing Suduko for fun for awhile but I never knew the math behind it. They were both good talks and we ended up doing Latin squares in stats after this talk and it helped to have a little bit of background from these magic squares!