About Me

My name is Nan Ma. On many online forums I use the name "schuma" because I am a big fan of Michael Schumacher.

I am enthusastic about all the puzzles similar to the Rubik's Cube. They are called Twisty Puzzles on the Twistypuzzles forum. Duh. I have solved

• All of the puzzles on gelatinbrain's Virtual Magic Polyhedra. See the scoreboard.
• Many four-dimensional puzzles, including the tessaract MC4D, 120-cell, 24-cell, and a simplified 600-cell using Magic Puzzle Ultimate. I have solved 2x2x2x2 blindfolded.
• Puzzles with even higher dimensions up to 7D
• Puzzles in other topological spaces, including the hyperbolic space, projective plane, and Klein bottle, using MagicTile.
• The Complex 3x3x3, a very neat generalization of the Rubik's Cube.

I gave lectures on how to use group theory to construct algorithms to solve the puzzles listed above in UC Berkeley. Here is a recorded video.

I am an average speed cuber. My personal best is super-20.

My Puzzles

I have created several virtual twisty puzzles:

Lollipop: a 2D puzzle that contains all possible pieces twisted by all subsets of axes.

RefleCube: a Magic Cube allowing only reflection moves rather than twisting moves, or both.

Clockwork Cube: a Magic Cube on which the rotation of all the slices are correlated.

Twisty Star: a puzzle based on the beautiful compound of five tetrahedra. It is related to the face-turning icosahedra.

Magic 11-cell: a puzzle based on the abstract regular polytope 11-cell.

Rubik's Square: a 2D puzzle like the fifteen puzzle. But instead of sliding, only twisting is allowed.

Inside H3: not really a puzzle. It's a visualization tool to simulate what you will see when navigating a spaceship in hyperbolic polytopes.