Guy who invented rubiks cube

As a young boy, Rubik liked to draw and sculpt. Years later, he studied architecture and became obsessed with geometric designs. He eventually became a professor and taught a class called "descriptive geometry" - where he encouraged students to use two-dimensional images to solve three dimensional problems. When Erno Rubik was 29, he was in his bedroom tinkering.

He has described his bedroom as looking like the "inside of a child's pocket. One day, he tried connecting eight wooden cubes together so they could move around and exchange places.

And it promptly fell apart. After several experiments, he figured out a unique design that contained an interesting paradox: It was a solid object that was also fluid. Rubik decided to add 54 colourful stickers to the cube, with each side sporting a different colour - yellow, red, blue, orange, white and green.

That way the movement of the pieces was visible and trackable. Then Rubik kept twisting the cube until he realized something: There was no way back. He had twisted it so much, the colours were now all mixed up. He had no clue how to restore it to its original state. Realizing the cube could be restored to its original state, he submitted an application to the Hungarian Patent Office for a "spatial logic toy" called the "Magic Cube.

In the beginning, it was difficult to find a manufacturer willing to produce it, because it didn't look like a toy. Rubik was told no one would want to play with it.

I got married in ; my wife is an interior architect. Our little daughter, born in , is called Anne. Space always intrigued me, with its incredibly rich possibilities, space alteration by architectural objects, objects transformation in space sculpture, design , movement in space and in time, their correlation, their repercussion on mankind, the relation between man and space, the object and time.

I think the CUBE arose from this interest, from this search for expression and for this always more increased acuteness of these thoughts. I love playing, I admit it, I particularly games where the partner, the real opponent is nature itself, with its really particular but decipherable mysteries.

The most exciting game for me is the space game, the search of possible space shapes, that is to say the logical and concrete building of various layouts.

Of course you can't give the exact time of an idea's birth, it seems impossible to me, to me particularly, for who time, from this point of view, has very little interest. It can have been in spring, that the idea came to me, as a noteworthy possibility. I have a nature attached to experiences, so, since the beginning, I studied variations of a 2x2x2 cube. I was immediately struck by the wealth that could be sensed only from this start.

The final technical solution, which is the simplest form 3x3x3, the most easily workable in models, after a few tries, came to me toward the end of autumn, Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects.

From our Obsession. By Corinne Purtill Reporter.