¶ … Rubik's Cube first came to market in the 1980s, it was sold as a toy. The bright colors and seeming simplicity of the cube made it accessible to kids and adults alike. When my friends or my parents picked up my Rubik's Cube, they would twist and turn a few times and solve one side with a big grin before giving up. They would toss it back to me, and I would never put it down until every square was in order. You see, I have never viewed the Rubik's Cube as "just" a toy. For me, the cube was a springboard into the wonderful world of math.
My friends made fun of me for how obsessed I became with my Rubik's Cube. While they were playing video games, I would be reading about the algorithms that can be applied towards solving the cube. In some ways, solving the cube is amazingly simple. Yet someone like me who finds math entertaining discovers endless hours of joy contemplating the layers of mathematics the cube only begins to represent. It was no wonder I enrolled at the Stanford University Education Program for Gifted Youth in the summer of 2007. I took the course "Mathematical Logic and Problem Solving" with my fellow young math geeks and found a place in which I thrived. It was also not a surprise to anyone when I started a Rubik's Cube club.
At Stanford, finally among people who thought like me, I could brainstorm with fellow students and even teach some of them about the wonders of the Rubik's Cube. At this time, I started to buy books about the Rubik's Cube -- I was amazed at how much had been written already and how many other people were as fascinated by a simple group of plastic squares as I was. For example, my parents bought me Dan Harris's Speedsolving the Cube.
Reading the books was a humbling experience for me, because I went from believing I knew everything about the cube already to finding out that there were many other mathematical concepts I had yet to even hear about, let alone understand. To keep my friends at Stanford entertained, I found a list of Web sites devoted to the Rubik's Cube and together we would work on the cube. I even gave my club members "homework" assignments so that we could all practice the Rubik's Cube in our own time. I continue to find Jasmine Lee's (2008) Web site "Beginner Solution to the Rubik's Cube" an excellent one for learning how to solve the Rubik's Cube using mathematics instead of just chance, as I noticed some people try to do.
"Teach me how!" I started to hear more and more from my friends back at home, after the Rubik's Cube was re-released for its anniversary. This caused many of my friends to discover the Rubik's Cube for the first time, and to my great surprise many of them found it as amusing as I did. For the first time, I saw some of my friends playing with the Rubik's Cube instead of with their XBox. The more they learned about the Rubik's Cube, the more they wanted to learn and I lent out my book on the Rubik's Cube and also coached my friends on how to solve it.
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