From: David Singmaster Computing & Maths South Bank Univ To: korf@cs.ucla.edu Subject: RE: How many Cubes have been sold? Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1165 I'm doing this from memory. If you want, I can look up what I wrote about 20 years ago. Ideal told me they sold about 20 million cubes in one year - I think this was in the US. Polytechnika said they sold about twice (or several) times as many cubes in Hungary as there were people, making perhaps 10 million. Both of these statements were while the cube craze was in midstream. So I suspect that somewhere between 50 and 100 million legitimiate cubes were sold. However the pirate cubes sold perhaps twice as many. So I've generally given an estimate of 200 million! I think this may be conservative, but the number was probably somewhere between 100 and 300 million. This doesn't take account of the fact that the fad started rather later in the Communist countries and they may have produced many millions as well, though I don't think this would make a huge difference to the estimate above. DAVID SINGMASTER, Professor of Mathematics and Metagrobologist School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics Southbank University, London, SE1 0AA, UK. Tel: 0171-815 7411; fax: 0171-815 7499; email: zingmast or David.Singmaster @sbu.ac.uk