h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Cayley tables are Latin squares, not magic squares.

Magic squares have no elements repeated at all eg 1-9
8 1 6
3 5 7
4 9 2

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MagicSquare.html

Latin Squares have no elements repeated within any column or row - like sudoku http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LatinSquare.html

After that point in the entry though the wheel came off, due to my failure to pick up what was meant by 'order' from its mention in Lagrange's Theorem onwards. Up until then 'order' is used in a different sense - which operarion comes first which comes next and so on.

Pimms

Thanks for the correction. One of the curators should be fixing this. I don't know why I thought it was a magic square.

By the way, order (in the sense I use it in the langrange theorem bit, and later), is the number of element in a set. So the group K I mention in the entry is a group of order 3, as it has 3 elements (0, 1 and 2). I hope that helps.

Changes made: F3198237?thread=3526001