fl. c. 1300

Byzantine scholar who wrote a work on the subject of magic squares. A magic square is a square containing integers arranged in such a fashion that the sum of the numbers for each row, column, and main diagonal (and often in some or all of the other diagonals) is the same. The concept had first appeared in the writings of Arab mathematicians more than three centuries before, but Manuel was perhaps the first European scholar to comment on the topic.