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THE first person to solve a Rubik's Cube spent a month struggling to unscramble it. It was the puzzle's creator, an unassuming Hungarian architecture professor named Erno Rubik.
When he invented the cube in 1974, he wasn't sure it could ever be solved. Mathematicians later calculated that there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to arrange the squares, but just one of those combinations is correct. When Mr Rubik finally did it, after weeks of frustration, he was overcome by "a great sense of accomplishment and utter relief".
Looking back, he realises the new generation of "speedcubers" - Yusheng Du of China set the world record of 3.47 seconds in 2018 - might not be impressed. "But remember, this had never been done before," Mr Rubik writes in his new book, Cubed.
In the nearly five decades since, the Rubik's Cube has become one of the most enduring, beguiling, maddening and absorbing puzzles ever created. More than 350 million cubes have sold globally; if you include knockoffs, the number is far higher.
They captivate computer programmers, philosophers and artists. Hundreds of books, promising speed-solving strategies, analysing cube design principles or exploring their philosophical significance, have been published.
The cube came to embody "much more than just a puzzle", cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter wrote in 1981. He added: "It is an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, an inspiration."
โWhat is the real nature of the cube?
But even as the Rubik's Cube conquered the world, the publicity-averse man behind it has remained a mystery. Cubed, which was released this week, is partly Mr Rubik's memoir, partly an intellectual treatise and, in large part, a love story about his evolving relationship with the invention that bears his name and the global community of cubers fixated on it.
"I don't want to write an autobiography, because I am not interested in my life or sharing my life," he said during a Skype interview from his home in Budapest. "The key reason I did it is to try to understand what's happened and why it has happened. What is the real nature of the cube?"
Mr Rubik, 76, is lively and animated, gesturing with his glasses and bouncing on the couch, running his hands through his hair so that it stands up in a grey tuft, giving him the look of a startled bird.
He speaks formally and gives long, elaborate, philosophical answers, frequently trailing off with the phrase "and so on and so forth" when circling the end of a point. He sat in his living room, in a home he designed himself, in front of a bookshelf full of science fiction titles - his favourites include works by Isaac Asimov and Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.
He speaks about the cube as if it's his child. "I'm very close to the cube. The cube was growing up next to me and right now, it's middle-aged, so I know a lot about it," he said. "Here's one," Mr Rubik said, retrieving it from the coffee table, then fiddling with it absent-mindedly for the next hour or so as we spoke.
As he was writing Cubed, his understanding of his invention evolved, he said.
"On the way to trying to understand the nature of the cube, I changed my mind," he said. "What really interested me was not the nature of the cube, but the nature of people, the relationship between people and the cube."
Reading Cubed can be a strange, disorienting experience, one that's analogous to picking up and twisting one of his cubes. It lacks a clear narrative structure or arc - an effect that's deliberate, Mr Rubik said.
Initially, he didn't even want the book to have chapters or even a title. "I had several ideas, and I thought to share this mixture of ideas that I have in my mind and leave it to the reader to find out which ones are valuable," he said. "I am not taking your hands and walking you on this route. You can start at the end or in the middle."
Or you can start at the beginning. Mr Rubik was born on July 13, 1944, about a month after D-Day, in the basement of a Budapest hospital that had become an air-raid shelter. His father was an engineer who designed aerial gliders.
As a boy, he loved to draw, paint and sculpt. He studied architecture at the Budapest University of Technology, then studied at the College of Applied Arts. He became obsessed with geometric patterns.
As a professor, he taught a class called descriptive geometry, which involved teaching students to use two-dimensional images to represent three-dimensional shapes and problems. It was an odd and esoteric field, but it prepared him to develop the cube.
In the spring of 1974, when he was 29, Mr Rubik was in his bedroom at his mother's apartment, tinkering. He describes his room as resembling the inside of a child's pocket, with crayons, string, sticks, springs and scraps of paper scattered across every surface. It was also full of cubes he made, out of paper and wood.
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