These notes cover enough group theory and graph theory to understand the mathematical description of the Rubik’s cube and several other related puzzles. They follow a course taught at the USNA during the Fall and Spring 1996-7 semesters.
”By and large it is uniformly true that in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment it becomes useful; and that this lapse can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.”
John von Neumann