"The Lost Symbol" - Magic Squares and the Masonic Cipher

the letters. You see, they are scrambled, definitely scrambled. That's another extra complication. Not only that, but he added a third layer of complication. The message, after de

cipher

ing everything, if you read the book, you will see, the message means nothing. Because? It was in Latin. After you discovered that they use the Masonic

cipher

, or the Pig Pen cipher, and that it was organized in this format of Dürer's four-by-four

magic

square, and you discovered what the letters were in the correct order, you now had to know Latin to understand it. That's the story here. You have a nice novel here.

If you like chase scenes, this is good. It has all kinds of

symbol

s and things like that, and it claims that this is the missing

symbol

here. I don't know, that's a zero. No interior angles. It's a very interesting novel, and this is where he got all these ideas from, you see, the

magic

squares

, the cipher, plus the added complication that, after you figured out what the letters were, unless you knew Latin, you wouldn't. It had no meaning to you. Basically that's it. Now, in another part of the book, he also uses Benjamin Franklin's square. This is Dürer's Square.

He used Dürer's magic square. He used the Masonic cipher. Then the message was written in Latin, so you had to know Latin. Then there was another complication to the whole thing: he used an eight-by-eight square from Benjamin Franklin. Let me find this square for you here. Of course, we know it's not a magic square because, you see, here's the square, but the two main diagonals don't add up to the magic sum. Now, just to see if that works, eight times eight should add up to eight times eight squared plus one divided by two. This should be the sum.

That's two, 64 plus one is 65, and that's four, and 65 times four is 260. The sum here of each row, each column, is 260, but the two main diagonals are not 260, so by definition, no It's A Magic Square, but look what else this thing does. It's amazing. If you add these, these, these or these positions, those are 260. This and the two corners are 260, this and this, you see, these arrows, these two corners are 260, these four corners are 260, the four corners and the four the middle is 260. Yes? - Did Franklin know? - Yes, yes, yes, he knew it. Then he made a 16 by 16 magic square.

I didn't check that if it's true or not, but eight by eight isn't. Mr. Brown stops here and says eight times eight is fine. Although it is not a true magic square, he uses it. Now he calls these folded rows and things like that. The reason I'm showing this to you on the Internet is that I hope people will look at all these ideas of magic

squares

and Masonic ciphers. In fact, there are websites where you can get the Masonic cipher as a source, you can install it on your computer and that's how I wrote this little note to you.

Then you can write Masonic cipher or Pig Pen cipher. Now, what did I write here? Well, let's see. What did I write? Should I tell you? - What did you use as a key? - I don't know, let me see. I do not remember. Therefore, every time you use a key, you should write it down. This is like having many passwords. The only person you're excluding from there is probably you because you forgot the password you used. Let's see, what did I write here? I wrote this. Now, one way code breakers use to crack codes is to try to find out what language it was written for.

They then look at the language and find out which letter appears most frequently in that language. For example, in English it could be the letter E. Then they look at the message and check which symbol appears most frequently. That's probably the E. Then they go from there. They try to crack the code, but what is this? Note that the first tip here is that it is laid out in a four-by-four layout. That's a clue because we'll probably, probably, introduce this level of difficulty, or this one, or this one, but it probably has something to do with a four-by-four square.

I'll probably have to read it this way. This will be number one. This is number two, this is number three. This is number four. Sorry, number four is down here, if I'm using this one. So number five is here, number six is ​​here, number seven is here and number eight is in this position. Nine, it's here, 10, 11 and 12, and then 13, 14, 15 and 16. That's the arrangement of the symbols. Now, that's number one, and based on this, this would be an E. Okay? If I do that and find out, I'll be in a mess. That's where the extra complication comes in, and you mentioned it, maybe there's a key to this.

If you don't know the key, you don't know where to start. Well, since you are all my friends here, the key is the key word, just like I did here. That's my key, the key word. This one, which is number one, is actually a B. That's a B. Here's number two. Number two, I'm here now, that's an E. It's the second letter in that position. Here is the number three, and that is the first letter in this position. That's a Y. Where's the number four? Here it is, that's number four. The number four is the second letter here, you see, because it has a period.

The number five is this one, which you see is N. Then the number six is ​​this symbol, which is D. Oh, look at that, over there. If you figure out everything else, it says, "Beyond Dan Brown and the Lost Symbol." That's the little presentation. I hope we didn't put you to sleep. I hope you enjoy the pizza, you read the book, and I hope we've given you a little entertainment, a little knowledge about symbols, figures, magic squares, and languages. Thank you so much. (students applaud)