History
The order-7 Room square was used by Robert Anstice to provide additional solutions to Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in the mid-19th century, and Anstice also constructed an infinite family of Room squares, but his constructions did not attract attention. Thomas Gerald Room reinvented Room squares in a note published in 1955, and they came to be named after him. In his original paper on the subject, Room observed that n must be odd and unequal to 3 or 5, but it was not shown that these conditions are both necessary and sufficient until the work of W. D. Wallis in 1973.
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