thegentlemancuber

So I've interviewed hundreds of people in the process of writing this book, and can more or less count on two hands the number of people who figured it out on their own. (Obviously Rubik, the inventor, had to!) So that's really hard, and you need some pretty high level spatial and mathematical skills.

I learned initially from a person, Toby Mao, a former world record holder, and then got faster by a mix of internet stuff (like youtube--check out badmephisto's videos on YouTube) and meeting cubers at competitions and asking for advice!

As far as the world record goes, there's no way I'll ever beat that. It's down to 4.74 seconds, which was set by Mats Valk, a really awesome cuber from Holland, just the other weekend.

but I do hope to keep getting faster--my goals next year are to get a sub-11 second single and sub-15 second average in competition!

So, solving a Cube is kind of like doing math, only what Margaret Wertheim, a really excellent journalist, has called "embodied mathematics." (You know, sort of like how when you throw a baseball, you're embodying principles of geometry, etc.)

As far as high-level math treating the Cube, once it got out into the world, in the early 80s, mathematicians fell in love with it; there's an early book called "Rubik's Cubic Compendium" which I think was published by Oxford University Press and deals with the math of it.

To be clear, you don't HAVE to know lots of math to solve it, but you certainly can use math to solve it.

Thanks! (My gf is really into waistcoats and turned me on to them.) I got into Rubik's Cubes at summer camp in 2005; I happened to sit next to Toby Mao, a teenager from the SF Bay Area who happened to be one of the fastest "cubers" on the planet. (I didn't know that; I just knew he could solve the Cube under the table without hardly looking at it. [Actually, it kind of looked like he was diddling himself, but don't tell him I said that!])

Toby taught me to solve the Cube and years later I got back into it!

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

None (on purpose.)

But, funny story, I was on Good Day New York recently, with Greg Kelly and Rosanna Sciotto, and Greg threw one of my cubes over his shoulder and it exploded.

Inside, I was like -________________-

But I kept smiling at the camera!

So there were sort of three moments:

1) In the 90s, I encountered one at a science museum gift shop, and learned I didn't know how to do it. (I didn't know it was a puzzle! I just started twisting it and realized only later that i couldn't put it back together.)

2) i went to a summer camp in 2005 where I learned to solve it, thanks to Toby Mao, a cuber (and former world record holder) who taught Will Smith for the Pursuit of Happyness

3) I found out, in 2012, that Toby and his older brother, Tyson, were instrumental in creating the World Cube Association, which is like the FIFA of Rubik's Cubes--only less corrupt, because they have less $$$--and no one had written a book about it, so here we are!