MEET ERNŐ RUBIK

He devised one of the world's most popular and enduring puzzles-and he's still learning from it

- Alexandra Alter

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 ErnőRubik. 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 realizes 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 2020 memoir, Cubed, “this had never been done before.”

In the nearly five decades since, the Rubik’s Cube has become one of the most enduring, beguiling, maddening, and absorbing puzzles ever created. More than 350 million cubes have sold globally; if you include cheap copies, the number is far higher. They captivate computer programmers, philosophers, and artists. Hundreds of books, promising speed-solving strategies, analyzing cube design principles or exploring their philosophical significance, have been published.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter wrote in 1981 that the cube "is an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, an inspiration."

But even as the Rubik’s Cube conquered the world, the publicity-averse man behind it has remained a mystery.