Ten on Tuesdays: 10 Things You Might Not Know About the Rubik's Cube

In true "Ten on Tuesdays" fashion, I thought "What could I ramble on and on about easily?" Bam.  The Rubik's Cube.  

In 9th grade, I set out to solve the Rubik's Cube.  It took me about a month to work it out, and I've fiddled with it ever since.  In college, I did my Senior Project on the math behind the Rubik's Cube, and I learned all kinds of interesting tid-bits about the history of the cube.  For your edification:

1. The cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Erno Rubik.  
2. Rubik didn't realize the difficulty of the puzzle he had created until he mixed it and then tried to solve it; it took him about one month to solve it the first time.
3. The cube was sold to a toy company and marketed as the Magic Cube.  
4. Erno Rubik was the first self-made millionaire under communism.  
5. As far as I can gather, the fastest cube solve to date is 5.66 seconds.  You can watch it here.
6. Any combination of the Rubik's cube can be solved in 20 moves (some can be solved in fewer, but all combinations are able to be solved in 20).  This is called God's number, because it is the way he would do it if he were solving it.  You can read an interesting history of God's number here. (Google donated 15 years of idle computer time for researchers to study it.  The work was just finished in July 2010.  Get excited people!  Math is pretty unchanging so there's not closure on new advances very often.)
7. If 1,000,000 combinations were viewed per second, it would take 1,375,280 years to view them all.  Thus, Rubik was correct when he realized it was vain to try to solve the cube by happenstance. 
8. The number of possible combinations for the Rubik's cube is:  (8!)(12!)(38)(212) ÷ 12 = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.  This can be reduced to 227·314·53·72·11.  
9. A group of 11 artists made the world's largest art piece out of 12,090 cubes, and was a copy of "The Creation of Adam."
10. Beware if you get hooked on the cube!  In the 1980s the medical field added the term “Rubik’s thumb” to their jargon to define the injury of a strained thumb due to too much cube-twisting.