Where does Sudoku come from?
Sudoku comes from Indiana, in the United States. The modern puzzle was most likely created by Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indianapolis, and first appeared in 1979 in an American Dell puzzle magazine under the name Number Place.
A puzzle with no byline
Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games printed Number Place from May 1979 without naming its maker. Garns, born in Connersville, Indiana, in 1905, was 74 years old and a freelance puzzle constructor. At the Daggett architecture firm in Indianapolis, colleagues later remembered him working on a secret 'game' at a spare drawing board: it looked like a crossword, but with numbers in little squares. He died in 1989, years before his puzzle became a worldwide craze.
Japan gives it a name
In April 1984 Maki Kaji, president of the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, introduced the puzzle in Japan as Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, 'the digits must be single'; according to the BBC, he had found it in Dell's American puzzle books. In 1986 he shortened the name to sudoku, 'digit-single'. Two decades later it went global: Wayne Gould, who had written a computer program to produce the puzzles, persuaded The Times of London to print them in November 2004.
Why people think of Japan
The name is Japanese, and Japan made the puzzle popular first, so many people assume it was born there. But the grid of nine rows, nine columns and nine 3×3 boxes had appeared in an American magazine five years earlier. In 2005 the New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz traced it to Garns: his name was always on Dell's list of contributors when Number Place ran, and never otherwise. French newspapers had printed similar number puzzles in the 1890s.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Sudoku ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Howard Garns ↗ · content.time.com ↗
