Harvey Denis Heinz, Biographical sketch
text parts from "Magic Square Lexicon: Illustrated", by Harvey D. Heinz and John R. Hendricks, 2000

Harvey Heinz was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on the 31st of August 1930, the oldest of 5 boys and one girl, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, at age 10.

He entered the printing industry at age 15 as an apprentice paper ruler. At that time, unknown to him, it was already a dying industry. On his semi-retirement in 1991, he was the only paper ruler still operating from Toronto west, and probably the only one in all of Canada.

Harvey Heinz in 2003

He was always interested in mathematical puzzles and especially number patterns. He was also interested in electronics and became an amateur radio operator in 1948, building all his own equipment. In 1956, Harvey married Erna Goerz and they subsequently had two sons, Randal and Gerald. In 1958, he designed EDRECO (EDucational RElay COmputer), and after obtaining about 5 tons of obsolete equipment from the local telephone company, started a computer club of senior high school students. Several units of the computer were built and operating successfully, the most notable being the arithmetic logic unit (ALU).

In 1973, Harvey was suddenly out of a job, so decided to work part-time at his trade and concentrate on bringing some of his electronic games to market. During this time, he attended many free engineering seminars on computer circuits. He also took several technical courses at the local Institute of Technology by brazenly writing prerequisite exams. By 1977, he realized his plans were not practical, so he and wife Erna started a printer trade bookbindery. By 1983 sons Randy and Gerry were both involved with the company and it was starting to grow. At that time the boys bought a half interest in the company so they could participate in this growth. In 1991 Harvey and Erna sold them the other half interest and semi-retired.

Then Harvey had time to get back to his hobbies. Building electronic hardware was replaced by operating computers. This fit in perfect with his interest in number patterns! He was now able to investigate all sorts of patterns that previously he had just wondered about.

Heinz major accomplishments in number patterns:

• Found all solutions for magic stars orders 6 to 11 (by computer exhaustion)
• Found all solutions for order-12 pattern B magic stars (826,112) and most for the other 3 patterns of this order
• Found all minimal and smallest consecutive prime solutions for orders 5 and 6 prime number magic stars
• Discovered a 3-D magic star (in association with Aale de Winkel)
• Investigated Isolike, Pan-magic stars and Quadrant magic squares (also in association with Aale de Winkel)
• Investigated Self-similar magic squares
• Published a book entitled Magic Square Lexicon: Illustrated, co-authored with John R. Hendricks (2000)
• Published a large Web site on number patterns at http://www.magic-squares.net
• Compiled a collection of all papers published on magic cubes
• Published a DVD entitled Magic Hypercube Omnibus: All about magic squares, cubes, tesseracts, etc... (2011), which included a full-text copy of the Lexicon

He passed away in Surrey, B.C., Canada, on the 6th of July 2013.

To the memory of Harvey Heinz

Geometric semi-magic square, by Miguel Angel Amela, Argentina, 2013.

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