David Singmaster facts for kids

Quick facts for kids David Singmaster
Singmaster in 2006
Born	December 1938 Ferguson, Missouri, U.S.
Died	13 February 2023(2023-02-13) (aged 84)
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Singmaster's conjecture Singmaster notation History of mathematics Mathematics of puzzles, especially the Rubik's cube
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	London South Bank University
Thesis	On Means of Differences of Consecutive Integers Relatively Prime to m (1966)
Doctoral advisors	Dick Lehmer, Russell Lehman

David Breyer Singmaster (born December 1938 – died February 13, 2023) was an American-British mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics at London South Bank University in England. He loved puzzles so much that he called himself a "metagrobologist," which is a fancy word for someone who studies or collects puzzles.

David Singmaster had a huge collection of mechanical puzzles and books filled with brain teasers. He became very famous for being one of the first people to truly love and promote the Rubik's Cube. In 1979, he started writing his Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube". This book was super important because it was the first to explain the Cube using mathematics. It also gave one of the first ways to solve it. His book also introduced a special way to write down Rubik's Cube moves, which is now called Singmaster notation. This way of writing moves quickly became the standard for everyone.

Singmaster was also great at finding out about the history of puzzles and even creating new ones. Many of his puzzles were printed in newspapers and magazines. In a field of math called combinatorial number theory, he came up with something called Singmaster's conjecture. This idea suggests there's a limit to how many times a number (other than 1) can show up in Pascal's triangle.

David Singmaster's Journey in Math

David Singmaster started college at the California Institute of Technology in the late 1950s. He first wanted to be a civil engineer, but then he got interested in chemistry and physics. After a short break from college, he went to the University of California, Berkeley. He didn't really get excited about mathematics until his last year there.

In his final year, he took classes in algebra and number theory. His number theory teacher, Dick Lehmer, gave a prize problem that David won! Later, his algebra teacher asked a question that even the teacher didn't know the answer to. David solved it, and this led to him writing two important math papers. He earned his PhD (a high-level university degree) from Berkeley in 1966. After that, he taught at the American University of Beirut and lived for a while in Cyprus.

In 1970, Singmaster moved to London. He became a lecturer in mathematics at the "Polytechnic of the South Bank," which later became London South Bank University. He was very interested in combinatorics (the study of counting and arrangements) and number theory (the study of numbers).

In 1971, he joined a team exploring old shipwrecks off the coast of Sicily. One day, he accidentally found a piece of wood sticking out of the sand. This led to the amazing discovery of the Marsala Punic Ship, a very old boat!

He became a professor of mathematics at London South Bank University in 1992 and retired in 1996.

David Singmaster and the Rubik's Cube

David Singmaster first saw a Rubik's Cube in August 1978 at a big math meeting in Helsinki. At that time, the Cube was very rare! Other famous mathematicians like John Horton Conway and Roger Penrose already had one.

Singmaster quickly got his own Cube. He traded an M. C. Escher art book for it! By early September 1978, he had figured out how to solve it. He said it took him "two weeks, on and off" to find a way to solve the Cube every time. In December 1978, he created his special way of writing down Cube moves, which is now called the Singmaster notation. In June 1979, he wrote one of the first newspaper articles about the Cube for The Observer.

In October 1979, he published his own booklet called Notes on the "Magic Cube". This booklet explained the math behind the Rubik's Cube and showed how to solve it using basic group theory (a branch of math). In August 1980, he released a bigger version of the book. It included ideas from other "cubologists" (people who study the Cube). The book also had his own "step by step solution" for the Cube. Many people agree that he was a pioneer of the common Layer by Layer method for solving the Cube.

If you solved the Cube using his method, Singmaster jokingly suggested you should:

Scream HOORAY!! Buy a round of drinks. Send me a cheque. Tell the orderlies that they can let you out now. Etc. etc.

His book also showed cool patterns you could make with the Cube, including his "cube in a cube in a cube" pattern, which he was very proud of. When the Rubik's Cube was super popular in 1981, his book was published by big companies like Penguin Books. He thought he sold about 50,000 to 60,000 copies!

Singmaster was known as "one of the most enthusiastic and prolific promoters of the Cube." In 1981, he was spending almost all his time promoting, reporting, and studying the Cube. He even started a newsletter called the Cubic Circular, which was published from 1981 to 1985.

Amazing Puzzle Collections

David Singmaster had one of the world's largest collections of books about fun math puzzles. He started collecting them in the late 1970s. By 1996, he had over 4,700 books! By 2013, his collection had grown to nearly 10,000 items. Many of these books were kept in a special library he added to his home.

He also had a huge collection of mechanical puzzles. He started this collection in 2002, and it grew to include about 3,000 puzzles. Around 400 of these were about the Rubik's Cube and its different versions.

From 1980 to 1982, he even had his own puzzle company, David Singmaster Ltd. It sold over 100 different puzzles and books.

Singmaster was both a puzzle historian and a puzzle creator. He published many of his puzzles in magazines like BBC Focus and newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. In 2016, he put a collection of his puzzles into a book called Problems for Metagrobologists.

He also helped rediscover one of the world's oldest books on puzzles and magic illusions. He found a mention of this old book in a 19th-century paper. The book, called De viribus quantitatis (which means On The Powers Of Numbers), was written around 1500 by a friar named Luca Pacioli.

Singmaster's Conjecture

Singmaster's conjecture is an idea in math that says there's a limit to how many times a number (other than 1) can appear in Pascal's triangle. Pascal's triangle is a pattern of numbers where each number is the sum of the two numbers directly above it.

A famous mathematician named Paul Erdős thought this idea was probably true, but also very hard to prove. So far, looking at the numbers, it seems like the smallest limit might be 8.

Media Appearances

In November 1981, David Singmaster appeared on a science fiction puzzle show on the BBC called The Adventure Game. From 1998 to 1999, he was often a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show Puzzle Panel, where people talked about puzzles.

Personal Life

David Singmaster was married twice. His second marriage was to Deborah in 1972. They adopted a daughter named Jessica in 1976.

David Singmaster passed away on February 13, 2023, at the age of 84.

Publications

Books

• Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube", David Singmaster. Enslow Publishers, 1981. ISBN: 0-89490-043-9
• Handbook of Cubik Math, by David Singmaster and Alexander H. Frey. The Lutterworth Press, 1982. ISBN: 0-7188-2555-1.
• Rubik's Cubic Compendium, by Ernő Rubik and four others. Edited with an Introduction and Afterword by David Singmaster. Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN: 0-19-853202-4
• The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Bestselling Puzzle, Jerry Slocum, David Singmaster, Wei-Hwa Huang, Dieter Gebhardt, Geert Hellings, Ernő Rubik. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009. ISBN: 157912805X
• Problems for Metagrobologists, David Singmaster, World Scientific Publishing Company, 23 April 2016. ISBN: 9814663638
• Adventures in Recreational Mathematics (in 2 Volumes). David Singmaster. World Scientific Publishing Company. (2021) ISBN: 9789811225642

Newsletters

• Cubic Circular magazine published 1981-5 by David Singmaster.

Articles

• The Unreasonable Utility of Recreational Mathematics by David Singmaster. First European Congress of Mathematics, Paris, July 1992.
• Solution to Meffert's Pyramorphix, by David Singmaster and Andrew Southern. Meffert's Puzzles, 15 May 1997.

See also

• How to solve the Rubik's Cube – Wikibook

In Spanish: David Singmaster para niños