Bernard Frénicle de Bessy

Bernard Frénicle de Bessy, who lived from about 1604 to 1674, was a French mathematician born in Paris who wrote numerous papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics. He is best remembered for Des quarrez ou tables magiques, a treatise on magic squares published after his death in 1693, in which he described all 880 essentially different normal magic squares of order 4, and the standard representation of a magic square is named the Frénicle standard form after him. He solved many problems posed by Fermat, discovered the cube property of the number 1729, later called a taxicab number, and wrote a treatise on right-angled triangles in numbers published in 1676. A member of many of the scientific circles of his day, including the French Academy of Sciences, he corresponded with Mersenne and Pascal and was particularly close to Fermat, Descartes and Wallis. His La Méthode des exclusions, published in 1693, set out ten rules for solving mathematical problems and shows an experimental approach to mathematics.