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. 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.
I'm also very interested in the game Tchisla and have built a webpage to help me explore the records.
In September 2018, I worked with Roice Nelson to explore possibilities of non-associative "twisty" puzzles. We built a proof-of-concept puzzle based on integral octonions in Python. Check the introduction and the repo.
I built a website to visualize the regular star polytopes in 2D, 3D, and 4D, plus hyperbolic star tilings. Check it out here. Below are some examples of the visualization.
