IN MEMORIAM:

JOHN ROBERT HENDRICKS

September 4, 1929 – July 7, 2007

John Hendricks was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, but grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. He saw his first magic square at the age of 13 and this proved to be the start of a lifelong hobby. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1951 with a degree in mathematics. He worked for the Canadian Meteorological Service until his retirement in 1984, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

John participated in many volunteer groups. He was the founding President, Manitoba Provincial Council, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in Canada, and assisted with the Shad Valley program. He received the Canada 125 medal, in recognition of significant contribution to community and to Canada, from the Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba on October the 19th, 1993.

John is known for his many published articles in meteorology, statistics and statistical climatology (at least 29). But the greatest preponderance of work was devoted to the study of magic squares, cubes and hypercubes. Since retirement, he developed a magic square course for Junior High students; spoke at teachers’ in-service sessions, spoke at university colloquia, etc.

In 1962, John published a paper The Five and Six-Dimensional Magic Hypercubes of Order 3 in The Canadian Mathematical Bulletin in which he introduced a much needed method of illustrating the 4-dimensional hypercube (the tesseract). Subsequently, he published over 45 articles on magic squares, cubes, etc in The Journal of Recreational Mathematics, as well as a small number in other math and educational journals. He also self-published a number of books on the subject. Much of his material is now in the University of Calgary Strens Recreational Mathematics collection.

He was the first to construct and project onto a piece of paper the four, five, and six dimensional magic hypercubes of order three. He was the first to exhibit all 58 magic tesseracts of order 3. He proved there were only 4 basic magic cubes of order 3 and supplied several methods of construction of odd-ordered magic cubes, including a diagonal rule for cubes. He developed methods for creating inlaid magic squares, cubes, and tesseracts. All of this was accomplished with the aid of a hand held computer only. (He obtained his first desk top computer in about 1999, and used it mostly for e-mail and web surfing.

Since 1999 John has constructed

In his later years John suffered from Parkinson’s Disease. By 2004 he was virtually incapacitated with it and was hospitalized and near death several times. He passed away in Victoria, BC, Canada on July 7, 2007.

Journal of Recreational Mathematics, Vol. 34:1, 80-81, 2005-2006. ,  © 2007 Baywood Publishing Co.,  Inc.

Reproduced by permission (July 7, 2008)