Sudoku 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 US architect, Howard Garns in 1979.

Garns based his game on the "magic square" grid concepts of eighteenth-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. 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 4*4 to 6*6 and even 10*10 cells, which began appearing in the thirteenth century.

Grid-style number puzzles 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 Puzzles 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.