Specializing in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to Solve

[groovedaddy]

“It’s a little plastic toy,” said Jessica Fridrich, tossing a Rubik’s Cube between her long-fingered hands on a stormy afternoon in her office at Binghamton University, her fingernails painted with a pastel pink gloss.

But the little toy, an icon of the era of Pac-Man and high-top sneakers, has made a big comeback. For a thriving subculture of people who try to solve the cube as fast as possible, Dr. Fridrich is a pioneer and a patron saint. She forged what remains arguably the world’s most common strategy for speed-solving the puzzle, and appeared in a documentary about the Rubik’s Cube released this fall.

Dr. Fridrich first cracked the colorful walls of the Rubik’s Cube in 1981 as a teenager living in a Czech coal mining city. Few people will spend decades decoding a plastic block, no matter how mathematically intricate. But few people are as tenacious as the architect of “The Fridrich Method,” a roadmap that requires a speedcuber to memorize and unleash at least 53 algorithms, each of which is a series of turns of the cube’s rows and columns in a given sequence.

For Dr. Fridrich, tackling an impossible puzzle is not a hobby, and the Rubik’s Cube is not simply a game. They are obsessions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/science/16prof.html?th&emc=th

[MineralMan]

1. One time, I solved Rubik's Cube...

I was seriously stoned and disappeared into the puzzle for a couple of hours, finally figuring out the system and getting it all sorted out. The next morning, after a long sleep, I found the cube, all back to its original state, but had no idea how I might have done that. My wife assured me that I did, though, saying, "You were so focused on that thing that you paid no attention to anyone else in the house."

So, I superglued the thing into that state. I've never touched one since. I'd be embarrassed that I could only solve it behind a joint. :bounce:

[Geoff R. Casavant]

3. I've solved it hundreds of times

Many years ago, my brother bought a book with solution alorithms. I memorized the sucker. Now I can't help but solve it.

Alas, bar bets are too few and far between to make any scratch off of this knowledge. It's a curse, really.

On an unrelated matter, once I was able to wow a store full of folks because I remembered a scene from the 1980s move "The Manhattan Project." There were little plastic brain-teaser puzzles in the store, and my friend showed me one, where there is a cross with four ball bearings, and you have to tilt the puzzle so each ball bearing is at the end of one of the cross arms. She tried for a few minutes and said it would take a genius to solve it, just like John Lithgow said in the movie. I took it, placed it on the counter, and gave it a hard spin, and each ball bearing fell into place. I forget the comment I made afterwards, but I can guarantee it was probably somewhat snarky.

[laconicsax]

2. Why does it matter that she paints her fingernails?

[anigbrowl]

4. It's supposed to make her and the article seem accessible

You know, 'just because you're a scientist doesn't mean you can't be glamorous too!' and so on. It's the NYT after all.

[laconicsax]

5. It looks like it's supposed to diminish her credibility by portraying her as "just another woman

trying to play in the boys' sandbox" rather than an accomplished researcher.

The line about the color of her fingernail polish sticks out like a sore thumb, and they don't do it with articles on male researchers, I wonder why.

[Orrex]

6. IMO Fridrich has no credibility until we get a description of her boobs

:sarcasm:

Good catch--I'm sure that the article's author meant it as an easy, offhand to make a brilliant researcher seem more human, but you're right that it diminishes her.

[anigbrowl]

7. because male researchers don't wear nail polish, that's why

Sorry, you walked into that one.

Certainly they do it with male scientists. You'll almost always find some level of personal description near the start of an article because that's what people are taught in journalism school - humanize the subject, make them accessible to the reader, paint a word-picture for them. It's sort of a hack technique, but you see it all the time.

Take a recent Economist profile of Sergey Brin; "As Google’s share price went up, Messrs Brin and Page became multi-billionaires. Wealth has its effects, and stories began leaking out. There was, for instance, the Boeing 767 that Messrs Page, Brin and Schmidt began sharing and that Mr Brin was eager to turn into a “party plane” with beds sufficiently large for comfortable “mile-high club” membership."

Does that mean the editors of the Economist think all mathematicians are sex-obsessed? Hardly.