FROM SUNDAY PUZZLE ON 2017-01-01:Take the four-letter men's names TODD, OMAR, DAVE and DREW. If you write them one under the other, they'll form a word square, spelling TODD, OMAR, DAVE and DREW reading down as well:
| T | O | D | D |
|---|---|---|---|
| O | M | A | R |
| D | A | V | E |
| D | R | E | W |
Can you construct a word square consisting of five five-letter men's names? Any such square using relatively familiar men's names will count. I have an answer using four relatively common names and one less familiar one.
For every 5 by 5 block you must have symmetry across the diagonal of the grid. This script uses a 'brute force' method where I use a list of names to generate all permutations of 5 different names, and then check each permutation for symmetry. I'm sure this can be optimized, and I would appreciate the feedback my email is (jxr984 at psu dot edu)
To solve this problem I needed a list of names that would be common to someone who listens to NPR. On Kaggle.com there was a great set of data from the US Social Security Card applications from 1880-2010. I chose this data over census bureau data because I got easier access to historical data, and I could find a CSV file.
It was hard quantifying what a "relatively familiar" men's name is. For instance no significant amount of children were named Adolf after WW2 but it definitely is a "relatively familiar" name. This is a rare example of a name being killed off by an individual, but a lot of strange edge cases affect the data and make "relatively familiar" hard to quantify. I eventually filtered out any name that didn't have more than 50 names given in a particular year, and to account for the larger population growth I only used the first 700 names. This brought the number of 5 by 5 name blocks down from over 3000 to 23. I then discussed if each of those 23 blocks contained "relatively familiar" names with my family.
My favorite name blocks so far: SCOTT CORRY ORVAL TRACE TYLER
I have included a text file with 3000 5 letter male name blocks I found.
python 2, pandas