Students Make Rubik’s Cube Mosaic Of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Face — And He Didn’t Hesitate To Respond

It seems that Neil deGrasse Tyson is everywhere these days, especially on Twitter and, now, even on Rubik’s cubes. Granted, of all the places you’d expect to see the acclaimed astrophysicist’s face, a Rubik’s cube mosaic may not have been your first guess on the list. But a group of 10 talented students just made Rubik’s cube history by pulling off an intricate mosaic of Tyson’s face in under two hours, Science As Fact reports.

The incredible piece of artwork was posted on Reddit four days ago by Thetrufflehunter and it immediately went viral.

“I posted it on Reddit for fun, and by the next day it had over 40,000 upvotes,” the student, whose name wasn’t publicized, said in a statement.

Thetrufflehunter (pictured lying down in front of the mosaic in the image below) seemed elated that his team’s artwork attracted this much attention and that Tyson himself took the time to respond.

“It sort of blew my mind that something like this could blow up. Dr. Tyson himself even commented,” he added.

The big-scale mosaic depicting the famous astrophysicist’s face took 10 people, more than 600 Rubik’s cubes, and about an hour and a half to come to life.

We had some spare time and 600 spare Rubik's cubes https://t.co/A0mRoSXs4A pic.twitter.com/97nWpfUi1V

— Daily Pictures (@getyerfix) May 15, 2018

This beautifully elaborate Rubik’s cube mosaic is so cool that even the big man himself gave it a thumbs up. Tyson replied to the post from his own Reddit account, which he has used in the past to host Reddit AMAs, and thanked the students for their amazing work.

According to Science As Fact, Thetrufflehunter has been solving Rubik’s cube puzzles for about five years. The Redditor decided to put his vast expertise to good use and teach other students how to master this skill by organizing a “sort of quarterly elective” at his school.

His project introduced a team of 10 students to the secrets of Rubik’s cube puzzles and as soon as everyone got the hang of how it’s all done, they went online to find a suitable template from which to build their mosaic of Tyson’s face.

As Thetrufflehunter explains in the comment section of his Reddit post, the template his team ended up choosing came from YouCanDoTheCube.com.

His team used a computer to generate the pattern in which the Rubik’s cubes were to be assembled and proceeded to solve each of the individual puzzles in order to create the image of Tyson’s face. By the time the mosaic was finished, 625 Rubik’s cubes had gone into the project.

“With 10 people it actually went pretty fast, and we finished the full mosaic in about an hour and a half,” Thetrufflehunter pointed out.

The student is no stranger to Rubik’s cube mosaics and has previously completed two more all by himself. Thetrufflehunter subsequently posted one of them on Reddit, noting that it took him eight hours to finish the mosaic, which also incorporated about 600 Rubik’s cubes.