David Collingwood

Group Theory and Rubik's Cube

In 1974, a twenty-nine year old Hungarian sculptor and architect invented a puzzle called "Rubik's Magic Cube". The magic cube has fascinated millions of people worldwide. About 150 years earlier, a young French teenage mathematician named Evariste Galois was developing a new branch of mathematics called "group theory". Galois was not working on solving puzzles, rather he was studying solutions of algebraic equations. In our course, we will link Galois' group theory with Rubik's magic cube and come away with a mathematical understanding of how and why the Rubik's cube puzzle can be solved.