John R. Hendricks

John Robert Hendricks (September 4, 1929 – July 7, 2007) was a mathematician specializing in magic squares and hypercubes. He has published many articles in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics as well as other Journals.

John Robert Hendricks was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, but moved with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia at an early age.

He attended the University of British Columbia and graduated with a B.A. in mathematics. He started his career as a meteorology instructor in the N.A.T.O. flight training program. Then for 33 years he was employed by the Canadian Meteorological Service until his retirement in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1984.

During his working years, he spent many hours in volunteer work in service groups. These included The Monarchist League of Canada and the Manitoba Provincial Council, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in Canada. He was a recipient of the Canada 125 medal for his volunteer work.

When he was 13 years old, he started collecting magic squares. As his interest in mathematics grew, so did his love of magic squares, and cubes. In the summer of 1951, he had just graduated from University, and was working in a fire-lookout tower near Campbell River, British Columbia.

He liked this job because it gave him lots of free time to indulge in his magic hypercube studies. Suddenly his tower was surrounded by the largest forest fire in Canada up to that time, and he barely managed to escape. He was relieved when he return after the fire to find that his precious notes had also survived.

His interest in magic squares had quickly advanced to higher dimensions: magic cubes, tesseracts, etc. He developed a new diagram for the 4-dimension tesseract. This was published in 1962 when he showed constructions of four-, five-, and six-dimensional magic hypercubes of order three [1]. He later was the first to publish diagrams of all 58 magic tesseracts of order 3.

He is also an authority on the design of inlaid magic squares and cubes (and in 1999, a magic tesseract). Following his retirement, he gave many public lectures on magic squares and cubes in schools and in-service teacher’s conventions in Canada and the northern United States. He also developed a course on magic squares and cubes which he conducted for seven years at Acadia Junior High School in Winnipeg.

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