Wikipedia
Octacube (by Mindope) is a type of puzzle made up of eight cubes with colors on the faces. The object of the puzzle is to arrange the eight cubes into a 2×2×2 cube such that all faces of the big cube show the same color, and all inside faces of the small cubes that magnetically touch are the same color. There are six colors in the puzzle, and each of the eight cubes shows the six colors, one per face.
There are some clever mathematics behind this puzzle. It turns out that for the above stated constraints, there are only five possible solutions, and they happen to be made up of the same eight cubes. It also turns out that these eight cubes must all have in common four pairs of adjacent colors. This condition, in fact, is both necessary and sufficient to yield the set of cubes giving the two solutions.
The Octacube is a large, steel sculpture of a mathematical object: the 24-cell or "octacube". Because a real 24-cell is four-dimensional, the artwork is actually a projection into the three-dimensional world. Octacube has very high intrinsic symmetry, which matches features in chemistry ( molecular symmetry) and physics ( quantum field theory).
The sculpture was designed by Adrian Ocneanu, a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University. The university's machine shop spent over a year completing the intricate metal-work. Octacube was funded by an alumna in memory of her husband, Kermit Anderson, who died in the September 11 attacks. The sculpture is displayed in the lobby of Penn State's math department.
Octacube may refer to:
- 24-cell or octacube, a 4-dimensional figure
- Octacube (sculpture), a large steel sculpture of an octacube
- Octacube (puzzle), a puzzle of 8 magnetic cubes, similar to Rubik's Cube