Sudoku
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"Su" means number in Japanese, and "Doku" refers to the single place on the puzzle board that each number can fit into. It also means a single person, one way to describe the game is "Number Solitaire." Although the name is Japanese, its origins are actually European and American.
The 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler developed the concept of "Latin Squares" where numbers in a grid appear only once, across and up and down. In the late 1970's, Dell Magazines in the US began publishing what we now call Sudoku puzzles using Euler's concept with a 9 by 9 square grid. They called it Number Place, and it was developed by an independent puzzle maker, Howard Garnes.
In the mid-1980s, the president of the Japanese puzzle giant Nikoli, Inc., Mr. Maki Kaji urged the company to publish a version of the puzzle that became a huge hit. Nikoli gave the game its current name, and helped refine it by restricting the number of revealed or given numbers to 30 and having them appear symmetrically. The game became increasingly popular in Japan and started becoming a fixture in daily newspapers and magazines. Two decades passed before the game was taken up by The Times newspaper in London as a daily puzzle. This development was due to the efforts of Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge originally from New Zealand. He first came across a Sudoku puzzle in a Japanese bookshop in 1997, and later spent many years developing a computer program to generate them. In the fall of 2004, he was able to convince The Times to start publishing daily Sudoku puzzles developed using his software. The first game was published on November 12, 2004. Within a few months, other newspapers began publishing their own Sudoku puzzles.
