Numbers, puzzles that Ben Franklin pursued

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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S NUMBERS: AN UNSUNG MATHEMATICAL ODYSSEY

By Paul C. Pasles

Princeton University Press, $26.95, 254 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

Can there be anything left to say about Benjamin Franklin? With the publication of this book the answer is yes, to a mathematical certainty.

This is certainly the book to give your favorite math fancier, the manic Sudoku puzzle solver, the armchair geometrician, demographer, or quantum mechanic. Equally, the mass of ordinary folk who idealize Franklin and those historians who make a living feeding the need for more Ben all the time, will revel in this newly discovered dimension to the American Founding Father who put the "poly" in polymath.

A confession: Like most newcomers to trolling through the endless archival stacks of Franklin's life I accepted the assertion of most of the biographers who went before me that while Franklin was a genius in many areas of learning — physics, meteorology, economics, intelligence, diplomacy, politics — his one shortcoming was that he was not too hot with numbers.

Author Paul C. Pasles, who teaches mathematical sciences at Villanova University, explodes this myth with a book that is an easy read for the innumerate but which also provides nourishment for those more skilled in the niceties of math. All of his adult life Franklin was fascinated with the sophisticated exercise known as magic squires (or circles) which at their simplest are grids of numbers which, when added in all possible directions produce the same total number.

Mr. Pasles has assembled every single one Franklin created as well as some other math exercises that have lain undiscovered until now. Also included are some contemporary math puzzles that offer the reader the chance to contest skills with Franklin himself.

"Our object is not to show that Franklin would have identified himself as a mathematician, only that he was adept at the systematic and creative ways of thinking about numbers, arrangements, and relationships that characterize mathematical thought. He was skilled in logical argument, taught himself mathematics as a teenager, and even learned some of the art of navigation on his own," Mr. Pasles argues.