NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Rubik's Cube, the Hula Hoop of the 1980s, is being pursued as scholarship at prestigious Yale University.
'The Magic Cube,' a 14-week undergraduate seminar, requires reading three books, writing a short paper and taking a mid-term exam.
But the real work is manual -- rotating tiny plastic multi-colored cubes until nine create a solid color on one face of the larger cube.
Books with solutions to the cube have sold in the millions. There are 43 quintillion possible moves. That's 43,000,000,000,000,000,000.
For Professor of Mathematics Robert Howe, it's a lesson in 'the structure of time and space.'
'If every person on this planet had a cube and made one move every second of the day, and no one repeated the same move, it would take 300 years to make all the possible moves,' says Howe.
Courses like Howe's, in a grab bag seminar catalog that includes 'Holy Humor,' 'Playwrighting' and 'Public Policy,' have taken some heat from traditionalists worried about keeping up Yale's standards. Howard Cosell lectured in one seminar.
Not to worry. Howe promises serious scholarship in the mastery of group theory -- the study of abstract mathematical constructions.
'One the one hand it looks like a simple cube,' he says. 'On the other, it has 43 billion, billion moves. That's a concept people don't run across very often.'
