Hip to be square: Rubik’s Cube turns 40

On a low stage, a young man examines a Rubik's Cube. Around him, an audience stands, precariously, on tables and chairs, or peering down from skyboxes. In one fluid motion, he activates a timer on the table before him and his fingers disappear in a blur of activity. When he sets the puzzle down and stops the timer, just seconds later, the audience erupts, nearly drowning out the announcer: "Feliks with a 7.95!"

Feliks Zemdegs has been here before. In 2011, when he was 15 years old, he travelled to Bangkok, Thailand, from his native Melbourne, Australia, to attend the biennial World Rubik's Cube Championship for the first time. The year before, he had become the first person to solve the puzzle in fewer than 10 seconds on average. As a result, he had become something of a celebrity, at least in a certain world.

On the online forums where competitive Rubik's Cube solvers congregate, he had been compared to Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. In Bangkok, at the championship, he was asked for autographs and pictures. And, at first, he seemed ready to justify his fame. In the early heats, he blew past the field. But, in the finals, his nerves betrayed him.

Now, two years later, in Las Vegas, in the United States, Zemdegs exhales and closes his eyes. Two solves down, three to go.

Erno Rubik, a Hungarian professor of design, invented his eponymous cube, he had no idea it would become one of the world's bestselling toys. Nor did he envision that it would affect fields as diverse as science, art and design - the subject of "Beyond Rubik's Cube", an exhibition at the Liberty Science Centre, in New Jersey, that opened on April 26 to celebrate the puzzle's 40th anniversary.

And he certainly couldn't have imagined that, one day, his puzzle would be at the centre of a competitive sport in which the top performers can solve it in less time than it takes to read this sentence aloud.