The Magic Squares of Manuel Moschopoulos - Introduction

Editor’s note: This article was published in January 2005.

The Byzantine scholar and teacher Manuel Moschopoulos (whose name incidentally means little calf) is well known to classicists for his work in editing and paraphrasing classical Greek texts (see [13], [17]), thereby aiding in their preservation and transmission. He is also remembered by historians of mathematics for his tract on magic squares, since it was here, for the first time in western thought, that the subject was discussed. It is now over 100 years since the Greek text of Moschopoulos' tract has been edited and translated. This was done by Tannery in 1886 ([16]), and the translation was into French. John Calvin McCoy translated this work from French into English in 1941 (see [9]). This paper presents a fairly literal translation of Moschopoulos' tract from the Greek into English, along with some brief biographical and mathematical details. The translation itself begins on page 7 and continues through page 12, with endnotes on page 13 and references on page 14.