The history of Sudoku

Sudoku looks Japanese, and it has a Japanese name, but its story is a journey across three continents.

Early ancestors

The idea of arranging symbols so that none repeats in a row or column goes back to the 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who studied “Latin squares”. French newspapers also printed number puzzles with similar ideas in the late 19th century.

Number Place (1979)

The modern puzzle appeared in 1979 in the American magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games, under the name Number Place. It is usually credited to Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indiana, who added the 3×3 box rule to the Latin square idea.

Japan and the name

The puzzle reached Japan in 1984, where the publisher Nikoli adopted it and gave it the name Sudoku, often explained as a short form of a phrase meaning “the digits must remain single”. Nikoli refined it with hand-crafted puzzles, and it became popular in Japan.

The worldwide boom

In the late 1990s, Wayne Gould, a retired judge from New Zealand, came across a Sudoku book in Japan. He wrote a computer program to generate puzzles and persuaded The Times of London to print them in 2004. Other British papers followed, then newspapers across the world in 2005, and Sudoku became a global craze.

Sudoku today

Today people solve Sudoku in newspapers, books and on their phones. Computers can generate and check puzzles instantly, which is how Hue Sudoku creates a fresh puzzle every time. Learn how to solve them on our how to play page and strategies page.