John Robert Hendricks, Biographical sketch
text parts from "Magic Square Lexicon: Illustrated", by Harvey D. Heinz and John R. Hendricks, 2000
(see his other biography by the JRM)

John Hendricks was born in Regina, Canada, on the 4th of September 1929. He received a degree in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 1951.

John R. Hendricks in 1951

He worked for the Canadian Meteorological Service for 33 years and took early retirement in 1984, and now resides in Victoria, B.C.

At the beginning of his career, he was a NATO training instructor. He worked at various forecast offices in Canada and eventually became a supervisor. Throughout his career, he was known for his many contributions to statistics and to climatology. While employed, he also participated in volunteer service groups. He was Chairman, Manitoba branch and earlier Saskatchewan Branch, the Monarchist League of Canada.

He was the founding President, Manitoba Provincial Council, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in Canada. He received the Canada 125 medal, in recognition of significant contributions 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. But the greatest preponderance of work was devoted to the study of magic squares, cubes and hypercubes.

John started collecting magic squares and cubes when he was 13 years old. This became a hobby with him and eventually an obsession. He never thought that he would ever do anything with it. But soon, he became the first person in the world to successfully make and publish five and six-dimensional magic hypercubes. He also became the first person to make inlaid magic cubes and a wide variety of inlaid magic squares. He has written prolifically on the subject in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics. His impressive bibliography can be found at http://members.shaw.ca/johnhendricksmath/bibliography.htm

His major last discoveries:

• an inlaid magic tesseract
• the placement of numbers for a perfect magic tesseract of order 16
• the placement of numbers in a perfect five-dimensional magic hypercube of order 32
• a new method of making bimagic squares of order 9
• the world's first bimagic cube of order 25

John R. Hendricks in 2002, on his scooter

In 2003, I was pleased to dedicate to him my bimagic hypercubes, the first known bimagic "tesseracts".

He had Parkinson’s Disease, and passed away in Victoria, Vancouver Island, B.C., Canada, on the 7th of July 2007.

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