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 gray tuft, giving him the look of a startled bird. “The key reason I did it is to try to understand what’s happened and why it has happened. “I don’t want to write an autobiography, because I am not interested in my life or sharing my life,” Rubik said during a Skype interview from his home in Budapest. “It is an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, an inspiration.” The cube came to embody “much more than just a puzzle,” the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter wrote in 1981. Hundreds of books, promising speed-solving strategies, analyzing cube design principles or exploring their philosophical significance, have been published.

They captivate computer programmers, philosophers and artists. More than 350 million cubes have sold globally if you include knockoffs, the number is far higher. In the nearly five decades since, the Rubik’s Cube has become one of the most enduring, beguiling, maddening and absorbing puzzles ever created. “But, remember,” Rubik writes in his new book, “Cubed,” “this had never been done before.” When Rubik finally did it, after weeks of frustration, he was overcome by “a great sense of accomplishment and utter relief.” Looking back, he realizes the new generation of “speedcubers” - Yusheng Du of China set the world record of 3.47 seconds in 2018 - might not be impressed. 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 he invented the cube in 1974, he wasn’t sure it could ever be solved. It was the puzzle’s creator, an unassuming Hungarian architecture professor named Erno Rubik. The first person to solve a Rubik’s Cube spent a month struggling to unscramble it.

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