bernard frénicle de bessy (about 1605–1675), was a french mathematician. he was born in paris. he wrote many papers about mathematics, number theory and combinatorics. the frénicle standard form, a standard representation of magic squares, is named after him. he solved many problems created by fermat. he also discovered a taxicab number and in 1693, he described all 880 essentially different normal magic squares of order 4.