Sudoku: A simple number game

The name Sudoku is an abbreviation of the Japanese phrase "Only single numbers allowed," but the game itself, contrary to popular misconception, was not invented in Japan or by anyone of Japanese descent. Rather, it was created by a retired U.S. architect, Howard Garns (1905-89), in 1979.

Garns based his game on the "magic square" grid concepts of eighteen-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who himself had adapted them from early tenth-century Islamic medical journals. The original magic squares, attributed to the Persian-born chemist, astronomer, and physicist Jabir ibn Hayyan, were nine-celled squares featuring numbers one through to nine, with five in the middle and each row, column, and diagonal adding up to fifteen.

"Scientists have identified Sudoku as a classic meme..."
---David Smith, The Observer (May 15, 2005)

It was known as the "buduh square," and became so popular that it doubled as a talisman. Magic squares then began to grow in size, from 4X4 to 6X6 and even 10X10 cells, which began appearing in the thirteenth century.

Grid style number puzzle appeared for a time in late nineteenth-century French newspapers, but it was Garns's Sudoku puzzle that was the first attempt at the modern game so familiar to us today. It was originally referred to as Number Place and was published in Dell Pencil Puzzle and Word Games in May 1979. In Japan it was first published in the puzzle book Monthly Nikolist by the Japanese company Nikoli in 1984, as Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru, "the numbers must occur only once." Two years later its grid was made symmetrical and fewer clues given, and when published in The Times of London in 2004, it became a phenomenon.
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Source:
"1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think"
-- by Robert Arp.

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