The Reclusive Inventor of the Rubik’s Cube Wants to Do More Than Amuse You
Math, man vs. nature, and me.
By Eleanor Cummins
For those outside the fold, the Rubik’s cube is cognitive kryptonite. Until this week, I’d certainly never solved one. Even now, saying that I solved a Rubik’s cube feels like a grievous overstatement of my accomplishments. The truth is that we — a patient pre-teen “cuber” whose solve time is 47 seconds, her slightly-less-patient middle school teacher (whose solve time, she’s embarrassed to admit, is closer to a minute and a half), and me — completed a cube together. Our collective solve time? One stressful hour.
The site of my public humiliation could not have been more incongruous with the task at hand. This week, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted groups of elite, would-be, and reluctant cubers for oohs, ahhs, personal guidance, and the gospel of the Rubik’s cube.
Scrunched into a private dining room at the museum’s incomprehensibly fancy Michelin-starred restaurant, observers and acolytes alternated between trying to convince a chunk of colored plastic to give up its closely-guarded secrets, and sitting briefly at the knee of its reclusive inventor. Hungarian professor Ernő Rubik developed the confounding game in 1974, largely for his own intellectual amusement…
