Mr. Knights, 29, used the Fridrich Method to win the 2003 competition
after seeking her out as a mentor four years earlier. At first
confounded by her techniques, he took a year off from college to learn
them while traveling by train through Europe and Asia.

The Fridrich Method requires first solving the top two layers of the
three-tiered Rubik’s Cube, selecting the face with the central white
square as the roof. (Each face has a middle square of a distinct color
attached to the cube’s central joint that dictates the color the face
will be when solved.) Most speedcubers learn to do this by intuition,
improvising until the white face remains intact and other squares fall
into place on their correctly colored sides. The crux of the Fridrich
Method lies in solving the third and last layer of the cube without
compromising the color scheme put into place in the initial steps.

To solve the third layer, the speedcuber must assemble all of the
yellow squares on the bottom face by applying one of 40 algorithms in
a phase called “orientation.” The cuber must instantly recognize which
algorithm to apply in order to have any hope of solving it with haste.
In the final step, permutation, one of 13 algorithms restores the
cube’s chromatic harmony, one color per face.

The world’s fastest speedcubers, including Dr. Fridrich, know more
than 100 algorithms to whisk the cube to its solution. They recognize
when the puzzle is jumbled or positioned in their palms in a way that
one set of moves is quicker than 99 others.

As a teenager, Dr. Fridrich saw a man demonstrating the Rubik’s Cube
at a mathematics seminar, and scrambled defiantly through a crowd to
touch it. She says it was immediately clear that she was “cube
possessed,” her shorthand for people who spend most of their waking
hours learning to speed-solve the cube. Even though no cubes were for
sale in her country then — the few people who had them bought them in
Hungary — she would not be stopped. She picked up Kvant, a Russian
math journal that outlined one method of solving the cube, and worked
it out on paper.

When she finally got her first cube, left behind by family friends
visiting from France, she began to improvise, cubing faster and faster
to beat record times from Prague, Hungary and the United States
printed in newspapers.

By the time the Czech national championship took place in 1982, Dr.
Fridrich was one of the fastest speedcubers in the country. She won
the championship, solving the cube in less than 23 and a half seconds
— a time that would now be laughably long in international competition
— going onto place 10th in the first world championship in Budapest.

........

WHAT ABOUT OTHER ACTIVITIES

  example - having brain livbe authomatically after the clinical
death? That happens a lot but the medical community needs a
phyospopher and philosophical matematician to get it right.

Dying in 4 minutes of clinical; death is a lie. It was already
challenged. we need to understnd it better,
not to have medical copmmunity take us down for no reason.