Sudoku’s has a very interesting history. The name Sudoku in Japanese means single number, “Su” is single and “doku” is number. Although its name is Japanese, its origins are actually European and American.

In the 18th century a Swiss mathematician named Leonhard Euler apparently made the concept of “Latin Squares” in which numbers in a grid appear only once, across and up and down. The Dell Magazines in the US stared publishing what we now call Sudoku in the late 1970s, using Euler’s concept with a 9 by 9 square grid. It was called Number Place, and it was developed by an independent puzzle maker called Howard Garnes. According to the Social Security Death Index, he died in October 6, 1989.

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 in that country. They soon became published in daily newspapers and magazines. Some how it took about two decades for it to reach The Times newspaper in London.

This got there with the help of a retired Hong Kong Judge who came originally from New Zealand, his name was Wayne Gould. When Wayne Gould went for a trip to Japan he came across a Sudoku puzzle in a Japanese bookshop, he then spent many years developing a computer program to create them. In 2004, he was able to convince The Times to start publishing a daily Sudoku puzzle using his software. The first game was published on November 12 of 2004. It only took a few months for other British newspapers to start publishing their own Sudoku puzzles.

By 2005, major newspapers in the US were giving their own Sudoku puzzles in their daily newspapers. Even though the software for creating the puzzles is necessary, it takes hours for it to create just one unique puzzle. There is still a mystery with the creation of Sudoku, no one knows who truly created the now widely popular Sodoku puzzle.