Word: rubik
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Worldwide sales of the original Rubik's Cube, the six-sided brainteaser invented by ErnÖ Rubik, a Hungarian professor of architecture, have now passed the 10 million mark. Moreover, the perplexing puzzle has spawned a bountiful and profitable array of sequels, spin-offs and solution manuals that is turning into a minor industry...
...world arms bazaar is a Rubik's Cube of complex and shifting relationships and one of the world's largest businesses; last year weapons transfers amounted to perhaps $120 billion.* Weapons are indisputably a growth industry...
Along with diet books, cat books and advisories on how to make a profit from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six-sided, six-colored, 27-part boggler with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known as Rubik's Cube. The latest entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet...
...looks innocuous enough-a brightly colored plastic widget that could have been designed by Mondrian. It was developed in 1974 by Rubik, then 37, an architecture professor, to give his students greater experience in dealing with three-dimensional objects. It has six sides, each with a different bright color. Each side is divided into three rows, each row into three smaller cubes ("cubies"). Each row can be made to rotate 360° so that one can twiddle the cube from top to bottom or from side to side...
David Singmaster, 42, an American who lectures on mathematics and computing at London's Polytechnic of the South Bank, is believed to know more about Rubik's Cube than even Ernö Rubik. Singmaster, whose 60-page Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" has gone into five editions, has become an unofficial repository of the puzzle's lore. An English postal engineer wrote him to report that cube playing had reduced his office's efficiency to zero, but that "being a government department, no one noticed." A Whitehall bureaucrat pleaded with him to supply...