Âé¶¹´«Ã½

Enigma Number 1537

By Susan Denham

18 March 2009

A name game

A school class consisted of Elsa, John, Marty, Paul, Sheila, Smack and Suzy. I explained to them that a 3-by-3 magic square consists of an array of nine different numbers such that any row, column or diagonal has the same sum. I asked each of them to make one using only whole numbers between 1 and 26 inclusive.

They each succeeded and I then asked them to replace their numbers by letters using A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on. Amazingly, in every case but one the child’s magic square contained the letters of their name.

Whose did…

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