Gaston Tarry

Gaston Tarry ( born September 27, 1843 in Villefranche de Rouergue, Aveyron, † June 21, 1913 in Le Havre) was a French amateur mathematician.

Tarry attended the Lycée Saint -Louis in Paris and then went to the French tax authorities to Algeria. In 1902, he went into retirement.

He was interested in mathematics, particularly combinatorics and recreational mathematics. For example, he improved the Trémaux ' method to find out a maze, solved the problem of the 36 officers of Leonhard Euler, by proving that Greek - Latin squares of order 6 do not exist, and he proved that pandiagonal Magic squares of order 3 n (where n is not divisible by 3 is ) exist by constructing one of order 15. He also scored more results Magic squares, for example, he constructed the first trimagic square.

In the triangular geometry of the Tarry - spot is named after him. He gave a method to determine the number of Euler paths of a graph and found some remarkable combinatorial identities ( Prouhet - Tarry - Escott problem)

Many of his results were recorded by Édouard Lucas in his books on recreational mathematics and Henri Poincaré was impressed by some of his solutions so that he cared for their publication in the Academie des Sciences.