David Singmaster

David Singmaster
March 2006
Born	1939 (age 77–78) Ferguson, Missouri
Occupation	Emeritus professor of mathematics
Employer	London South Bank University
Known for	Mathematics of puzzles, especially the Rubik's cube

David Breyer Singmaster (born 1939, USA) is a retired professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England, UK. A self-described metagrobologist, he has a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He is 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 (i.e., letters which denote the faces on the Rubik's Cube) which has become standard. He is both a puzzle historian and a composer of puzzles, and many of his puzzles have been published in newspapers and magazines. In combinatorial number theory, Singmaster's conjecture states that there is a 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. He intended to be a chemist, then changed to physics. He only became really interested in mathematics in his final year when he took some courses in algebra and number theory. In his last semester, his algebra teacher posed a question the teacher didn't know the answer to and Singmaster solved it, eventually leading to two papers. He gained his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966.

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