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Biography of Jacques Guéron:
Jacques Guéron (Nice 1948 -)
Photo in his office, taken by his wife in February 2006. Click on the image to enlarge it (541KB).
I am 57 years old and I am passionate about magic squares; I think I got a taste for it from the age of 12 or 13.
My first computer in 1985: an Amstrad CPC 64 monochrome screen and cassettes! It allowed me, thanks to the Basic language, to progress quickly in the development of magic squares although I had already constructed many of them by hand (in 1982-83 for example by hand a magic 64x64 of which 2 consecutive squares are precisely 1982-1983, which is of course not a new idea).
I have had quite a few books on magic squares for a long time. With the web and in particular www.multimagie.com run by Mr. Christian Boyer, I am overwhelmed with information on this subject.
I am also passionate about magical horse riding circuits; passion prior to multimagic but now surpassed by the latter!
Today, I work with a Pentium 4 clocked at 2.8 GHz and with the Pascal language through Delphi 5. But I must admit that when it comes to magic squares (multimagic), the brute force of a computer is far to be sufficient: as I mentioned above, passion is essential. Then, as there is no real law for the general construction of magic squares, you need a good dose of imagination and patience to find tips so as not to get lost in calculations that are impossible to carry out in time but also I had to familiarize myself with Pascal, which I learned on the job; in fact my training is rather mathematical, it certainly helped me a lot with magic squares in the field of combinatorial analysis.
I have an atypical curriculum: with a baccalaureate C, a first year of Maths Physics (in the computer science part we learned Algol at the time, which is obsolete today), a D.U.T in Electrical Engineering I became a professor of Mathematics through cooperation in Morocco and in different private schools in France; It was only at the age of 48 that I obtained my degree in Maths, which I prepared through distance learning courses at the University of Provence. From there, I was able to teach under contract as an auxiliary teacher with the diocese (still faithful to the private sector having done my Terminale C myself in Vichy at the Saint Dominique college). I have taught at all levels from middle and high school to Terminale, BEP, BTS accounting and IT, but what I appreciate most today are my private lessons with Terminale S, ES students. and even first year of Deug with whom a discussion on magic squares is always easier than in the noisy and often undisciplined classes of our days; in any case I have hope to imagine in conclusion and thinking of the computer science student (Fredrik Jansson with his first bimagic of order 10 in 2004) as well as the popularity of multimagie.com that magic squares will become a real mathematical recreation increasingly popular with younger generations.
In the Excel file of my bimagic square of 13, without revealing all my secrets, there is truly my way of acting for future bimagic squares and in particular on the bimagic of 17 currently under construction!
Jacques Guéron
February 24, 2006
Notes from Christian Boyer:
Just a few days after this biography, Jacques Guéron actually succeeded in constructing the first bimagic squares of order 17 then 19!
As for his order 13 bimagic, the secrets of constructing his order 19 bimagics are in his Excel file downloadable from the site. www.multimagie.com / translated with google language translator 2023-10-01 by Mikael Hermansson