Origins / Patterns, people and a developing idea
From pencil marks
to living grids.
Naglich Squares grew through drawing, spreadsheets and browser experiments. The history explains how the questions developed; the rules let you inspect them for yourself.
An idea shaped
by iteration.
Nick Naglich’s early interest began with multiplication patterns, small hand-drawn grids and designs resembling Celtic knots. Repetition and symmetry became things to explore visually.
Spreadsheet experiments during the 2010s made those patterns easier to vary and compare. In 2018, collaboration with Joshua Conci, also known as ApexPrimus, helped parameterize the spreadsheet constructions. That contribution is part of the project’s development, rather than a footnote to it.
The Naglich Squares name emerged in 2024. Browser demonstrations and three-dimensional phase stacks developed across 2024–25, followed by experimental cellular-automata explorations in 2025.
The present site brings those threads together: a stated construction, readable examples and tools for asking more precise questions.
Keep curiosity.
Keep its context.
Music mappings, cellular automata, quantum-inspired imagery and holographic computing ideas have appeared in the project’s exploratory work. They are directions of investigation, not consequences established by a modular grid.
A visual resemblance can suggest a question. Establishing a model of a physical system, a cryptographic property or a useful application requires separate definitions, comparisons and evidence.
This account keeps exploratory history distinct from the explicit arithmetic demonstrations. It does not turn a historical analogy into a validated claim.
Read questions and evidence →See the idea
in motion.
Start with a single cell, compare the eight orientations, then inspect successive phases as a stack. The tools and their explanations are available here.
Read the original accounts
The historical account preserves the spreadsheet development story and collaborator credit. Its plans and descriptions of “today” belong to the original writing period.
The historical computing essay records the author’s ideas and interpretations, not a demonstrated computer or physical model. Browse Guides & archive for the retained collection.