David Singmaster

David Breyer Singmaster (14 December 1938 – 13 February 2023) was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which quickly became the standard.

Singmaster was both a puzzle historian and a composer of puzzles, and many of his puzzles were published in newspapers and magazines. In combinatorial number theory, Singmaster's conjecture states that there is an upper bound on the number of times a number other than 1 can appear in Pascal's triangle.

Career

David Singmaster was a student at the California Institute of Technology in the late 1950s. His intention was to become a civil engineer, but he became interested in chemistry and then physics. However he was thrown out of college in his third year for "lack of academic ability". He taught at the American University of Beirut, and then lived for a while in Cyprus.

Singmaster moved to London in 1970. The "Polytechnic of the South Bank" had been created from a merger of institutions in 1970, and Singmaster became a lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. He went off course one day and noticed a timber sticking up out of the sand. This led to the discovery of the Marsala Punic Shipwreck. He was designated emeritus at London South Bank University in 2020. Some other mathematicians at the conference, including John Conway and Roger Penrose, already had one. He devised his notation for recording moves (now known as the Singmaster notation) in December 1978. In June 1979 he wrote one of the first articles about the Cube in The Observer newspaper.

In October 1979, he self-published his Notes on the "Magic Cube". The booklet contained his mathematical analysis of Rubik's Cube, allowing a solution to be constructed using basic group theory. In August 1980, he published an expanded 5th edition of the book retitled as Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube". In 1981, at the height of the Rubik's Cube craze, the book was republished by Penguin Books, with a US edition by Enslow Publishers. In September 1981, he was said to be devoting "almost 100%" of his time to promoting, reporting, marketing and analysing the Cube. He soon began publishing a quarterly newsletter called the Cubic Circular, which was published between 1981 and 1985. In 1996, he reported that the collection contained over 4700 works. He also collected books on cartoons, humour, and language. However, the venture lost him "a fair amount of money" and led to prolonged tax negotiations. He referred to this period of his life as "a massive overdose of cubism". He published a collection of his puzzles in his 2016 book Problems for Metagrobologists. He was instrumental in the re-discovery of one of the world's oldest books on puzzles and magic illusions when he came across a reference to the work in a 19th-century manuscript. The recovered text, De viribus quantitatis ('), was penned by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar who lived around 1500.

Singmaster's conjecture

In combinatorial number theory, Singmaster's conjecture states that there is a finite upper bound on the number of times a number other than 1 can appear in Pascal's triangle. Paul Erdős suspected that the conjecture is true, but thought it would probably be very difficult to prove. The empirical evidence is consistent with the proposition that the smallest upper bound is 8.

Media appearances

In November 1981, Singmaster appeared on the sci-fi-themed BBC puzzle show The Adventure Game.

Publications

Books

Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube", David Singmaster. Enslow Publishers, 1981.
Handbook of Cubik Math, by David Singmaster and Alexander H. Frey. The Lutterworth Press, 1982. . Publisher's description
Rubik's Cubic Compendium, by Ernő Rubik and four others. Edited with an Introduction and Afterword by David Singmaster. Oxford University Press, 1987.
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.
Problems for Metagrobologists, David Singmaster, World Scientific Publishing Company, 23 April 2016.
Adventures in Recreational Mathematics (in 2 Volumes). David Singmaster. World Scientific Publishing Company. (2021)

Reference works

Chronology of Recreational Mathematics by David Singmaster. 1996. (Available online at anduin.eldar.org)
Chronology of Computing by David Singmaster. 2000. (Available online at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt)
Sources in Recreational Mathematics: An Annotated Bibliography, David Singmaster. 8th preliminary edition. South Bank University. 2004. (Available online at the Puzzle Museum)
Mathematical Gazetteer of the British Isles, by David Singmaster. The British Society for the History of Mathematics. 2012. (Available online at the Internet Archive)

Newsletters

Cubic Circular magazine published 1981–85 by David Singmaster (available online at Jaap's Puzzle Page)

Articles

Moral and Mathematical Lessons from a Rubik Cube by David Singmaster, New Scientist, 23/30 December 1982
The Unreasonable Utility of Recreational Mathematics by David Singmaster. First European Congress of Mathematics, Paris, July 1992. (Available online at anduin.eldar.org)
Solution to Meffert's Pyramorphix , by David Singmaster and Andrew Southern. Meffert's Puzzles, 15 May 1997.

References

External links

Interview with David Singmaster at Twisty Puzzles. Originally published c. April 2002 (archive).
David Singmaster: List of Available Material. A compilation of materials by David Singmaster for teaching and his own interests. Last updated in 1996.
David Singmaster archive at London South Bank University.