Magic Cube completes half a century of creation in July

29/07/2024

Developed by Hungarian architect Ernö Rubik in 1974, the magic cube turned 50 this July, attracting mathematicians and enthusiasts all over the world. The date has been highlighted in several press outlets in different countries.

According to a report in the magazine Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios, since its creation, the toy has sold 500 million units and has been given a permanent place in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA.

The idea of creating the Cube appeared unpretentiously while Rubik was preparing a descriptive geometry lesson for the architecture and graphic design course he taught as a professor. It was also while playing with Plato’s five solids – regular convex polyhedra – that the Magic Cube began to be developed, as the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reports.

The whole process took many months to achieve the final result and was chronicled in the architect’s memoir, “Cubo: enigma of us all”, published in 2020. “For a long time, I didn’t realize I was creating a puzzle,” said the inventor in the book. Once the book was finished, the cubes were used as prototypes for Rubik’s dynamic geometry classes, and then made their way into the living rooms of people all over the world.

The Magic Cube is made up of 20 mini cubes, which form eight corners and 12 edges centered between them, designed so that the player can close each of the 6 sides of the cube so that all nine faces of the cubes are the same color. This structure is supported by six central pieces connected to the core, where there is a three-dimensional cross. Around it, the flaps of the edge and corner cubes interlock like a contraption, allowing the structure to rotate.

Mathematically, this has to do with the study of symmetry. In short, the idea is that the geometric object, even if it undergoes a set of transformations, does not have its structure altered.

For Cube enthusiasts today, the aim is not only to complete the challenge, but to do so in the fastest and most innovative way possible. One of the first virtual movements dedicated to the subject was CubeLovers, back in 1980.

Today, YouTube has come to be considered the “modern classroom” for learning how to solve the cube, due to the huge number of tutorials on the subject. In addition, since the first Magic Cube championship, which took place in Budapest in 1982, a series of others have been launched in various cities around the world.

“The cube has lived for so long and, in my opinion, it still seems alive and full of energy for generations to come, so it’s an interesting object. All I wanted to do was put something together and share it with people,” said Ernö Rubik in an interview with Wallpaper.

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