Ernö Rubik and His Magic Cube
Review posted November 1, 2024.
Peachtree, 2024. 36 pages.
Review written October 30, 2024, from my own copy, sent by the publisher.
Starred Review
Ernö Rubik and His Magic Cube is a picture book biography of the man who invented the Rubik's Cube, especially focusing on the process that went into the invention.
I love the way the art in this book uses lots of squares and other geometric shapes, and the bright colors that show up on the cube.
Ernö grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and loved puzzles right from the start. The book shows him playing with tangrams, pentonimoes (shapes of five squares stuck together), and pentacubes (shapes of five cubes stuck together).
The book shows that later, as a teacher, he made three-dimensional models to teach his students. And then he wondered:
Would it be possible to build a big cube out of smaller cubes that moved around each other and stayed connected?
He decided to try it!
The book shows some of the things he tried first - for example, a four-by-four cube held together with paperclips and rubber bands. After he switched to twenty-seven cubes with nine on each face of the big cube, it took him days of thinking - and then a walk by a river gave him the thought of putting a round object in the center and getting the other twenty-six cubes to flow around it. (I love the way the illustrator portrays him walking around with a cube-shaped head as he was thinking about it!)
Once he figured it out, he put colors on the cubes' surfaces and started playing with it. And that was when he discovered he had a puzzle. He was the first person who had to figure out how to solve it.
At the time the book was printed, more than 450 million Rubik's Cubes have been sold worldwide. I remember when the phenomenon started - when I was just out of college - and I love that it's still a wildly popular toy. In fact, last year, my niece showed me that she'd learned how to solve them. So this book about their inventor is all the more relevant to kids.