30 Facts About David Singmaster

David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England.

David Singmaster had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers.

David Singmaster was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube.

In combinatorial number theory, David 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.

David Singmaster was a student at the California Institute of Technology in the late 1950s.

David Singmaster's intention was to become a civil engineer, but he became interested in chemistry and then physics.

David Singmaster only became really interested in mathematics in his final year when he took some courses in algebra and number theory.

David Singmaster taught at the American University of Beirut, and then lived for a while in Cyprus.

The "Polytechnic of the South Bank" had been created from a merger of institutions in 1970, and David Singmaster became a lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

David Singmaster went off course one day and noticed a timber sticking up out of the sand.

David Singmaster was promoted to a Readership at the South Bank Polytechnic in September 1984.

The polytechnic college became London South Bank University in 1992, and David Singmaster was the professor of mathematics at the "School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics".

David Singmaster became an honorary research fellow at University College London.

David Singmaster was designated emeritus at London South Bank University in 2020.

David Singmaster said that it took him "two weeks, on and off" to find a general solution for the Cube.

David Singmaster devised his notation for recording moves in December 1978.

Much of the mathematical content of the book was later reworked by Alexander H Frey in collaboration with Singmaster to create their Handbook of Cubik Math published in 1982.

David Singmaster was described as "one of the most enthusiastic and prolific promoters of the Cube".

David Singmaster soon began publishing a quarterly newsletter called the Cubic Circular which was published between 1981 and 1985.

David Singmaster had one of the world's largest collections of books on recreational mathematics which he had accumulated starting in the late 1970s.

David Singmaster had a huge collection of mechanical puzzles, which he started in 2002 containing "perhaps 3000 puzzles, of which about 400 are about Rubik's Cube and its variants".

David Singmaster referred to this period of his life as "a massive overdose of cubism".

David Singmaster was both a puzzle historian and a composer of puzzles, and he described himself as a "metagrobologist".

David Singmaster published a collection of his puzzles in his 2016 book Problems for Metagrobologists.

From around 2006 David Singmaster was a director at the New York-based Conjuring Arts Research Center, retiring from the position in 2013.

David Singmaster 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.

In combinatorial number theory, David 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.

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

David Singmaster was married twice, the second time to Deborah in 1972.

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