FROM NEW YORK TIMES
The first person to solve a Rubik’s Cube spent a month struggling to unscramble it. It was the puzzle’s creator, an unassuming Hungarian architecture professor named Ernő Rubik. When he invented the cube in 1974, he wasn’t sure it could be solved. Mathematicians later calculated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to arrange the squares.
When Rubik finally did it, he was overcome by “a great sense of accomplishment and utter relief.” Looking back, he realises the new generation of ‘speed-cubers’ (Yusheng Du of China set the world record of 3.47 seconds in 2018) might not be impressed.
“But, remember,” Rubik writes in his recent memoir, Cubed, “this had never been done before.”
In the nearly five decades since, the Rubik’s Cube has become one of the…
