Sudoku Origins

Here's some background to the long and interesting history of the Sudoku puzzle.

The name Sudoku or more correctly comes from Japan and consists of the Japanese characters Su (meaning 'number') and Doku (meaning 'single') but the puzzle itself originates from Switzerland and then travels to Japan by way of America.

Sudoku has its deep roots in ancient number puzzles. For many centuries people have been interested in cresting and solving puzzles. This was the basis of developing important mathematics.

Magic Squares

A magic square is a puzzle involving the ordering of consecutive numbers into a square (of size at least 3x3) comes to us from the mists of history.

The first known type is the Magic square that is first documented in China two thousand years ago. In this puzzle it is both a numerical and positional problem, as all the rows, columns and diagonal lines through the grid must add up to the same number. Just like in Sudoku a number can only be used once in the grid. The aim of the puzzle is to try to devise a new ordering of the numbers to complete the puzzle starting from scratch. Solutions were considered to have mystical properties and became part of the I Ching (Book of Changes) method of telling the future.

The 3x3 solution shown is called the Lo Shu diagram. It was considered the gift of the turtle from the River Lo. (the turtle had the magic square inscribed on its back). It was first recorded in print in the first or second century ACE. The magic square reached Europe from China by way of the Arabs who brought news of many of the Chinese inventions with them along the Silk Road. Thabit ibn Qurrah (from the ninth century AD) is credited with introducing the magic square to the Western World.

See also: Devising Magic squares; The Arabian connection

In Europe the first unequivocal appearance of the square is in Albrecht Dürer's engraving called 'Melancholia' in 1514 where a 4x4 magic square is clearly shown with an arrangement of the first sixteen numbers gives a sum of 34 in each row, column and diagonal. Any philosopher of the renaissance age would have known and understood the properties of magic squares.

Dürer's Magic Square: All rows, columns and diagonals add up to 34

See also: Alchemy and Durer

Chinese Puzzle

It is worth mentioning in passing the Chinese Puzzle that may well be familiar to many, it consists of a 9x9 grid of squares with one square missing.

The squares are scrambled and have to be shifted one at a time to form an ascending numerical sequence 1 to 8. The early versions used the digits 1 to 8 with the 9 missing but modern ones have pictures (which comes to the same thing). Like Sudoku it is a matter of finding a strategy of ordering squares in a grid in a particular way.

Swiss Genius

The great mathematician Leonhard Euler is the man chiefly credited with the creation of the puzzle that we now know as Sudoku.

Basle,Switzerland

Isaac Newton

Gottfried Leibniz

St Petersburg Academy

Euler turned his mind to all sorts of mathematical problems. Amongst other things he is responsible for the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter pi being denoted by the familiar Greek letter π and also i to denote the square root of -1. His pioneering work on imaginary numbers using his new notation transformed key fields of mathematics.

May be only as a hobby, Euler developed the basics of 'Sudoku' which he termed 'Graeco-Roman Squares' or Latin Squares - he used letters as the grid square symbols rather than numbers. He mused on what would happen if you removed the rule for magic squares that the sum of the diagonals must add up to the same number as the rows and columns and turn it into a puzzle of permutations. His thoughts on the subject were first published in 1782 in Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen 9, Middelburg pp. 85-239. This dissertation was probably first given as a lecture to the Academy on October 17th 1776.

Euler's Graeco-Latin square. The first four letters of the Greek alphabet α,β,γ and δ are combined with Latin alphabet a,b,c and d so that each occurs once in each row and column. In this case the greek letters occur once in each region too.

See also: A biography of Euler; Euler's original paper on Latin Squares

French Interlude

Euler's immense legacy of pioneering research has been much used by mathematicians and scientists ever since but the rather obscure puzzle he created was not immediately taken up by others, not even as a pastime.

A brief and localised version of Magic Squares appeared as a newspaper puzzle between about 1890 and 1920 in France. A puzzle was developed that removed some of the numbers from a Magic Square, because the puzzle required arithmetic not position it is rather different from Sudoku. This was further refined to become much more like traditional Sudoku with the numbers 1-9, but it did not catch on.

Journey to America

It took another fifty years before the puzzle was used by Howard Garnes in an American magazine. As in every good story the puzzle took on an extra twist. Instead of requiring just rows and columns to be permutations a new rule was added so that the grid was split into 3x3 regions of 9 squares and these regions must also have only one occurrence of each number. This makes it a more challenging problem for people to solve. Howard Garnes called the puzzle Number Place when it was first published by Dell Puzzle Magazines, New York in 1979.

Over the Pacific to Japan

It didn't take that long for the puzzle to move to Japan. Although the Japanese like brain teasers as much as anybody else, it is believed that it is the property of the Japanese language itself that caused Sudoku to undergo its final transformation into a worldwide phenomenon.

The Japanese language is a little tricky for crosswords as it is symbolic rather than phonetic. It is not so easy to devise a grid of crossword letters in the same way as you can in English. So the Number Place puzzle that the Japanese saw in Dell Puzzle Magazine had great potential as a replacement for the familiar crossword puzzle in Japanese newspapers and magazines.

The American name Number Place was translated as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru meaning 'the numbers must occur once only', but quickly became abbreviated to or in Western script Su Doku 'number only' or 'number single'.

First introduced in Monthly Nikolist magazine in April 1984 it rapidly became a very popular pastime.

The Japanese added another twist to the Sudoku puzzle. They imposed the rule that the pattern of revealed squares had to be symmetric and not just random (for more on symmetry please read our Sudoku symmetry page). They also stipulated that at least 32 of the 81 squares in regular Sudoku should be revealed. Although the first computer programme to generate and solve it was developed to in 1989, the best puzzles are still reckoned to be devised by human skill and judgement.

A worldwide phenomenon

The original idea of the puzzle can then be traced from China, through Persia to Europe and then across the Atlantic to New York. It then jumped over to Japan and it is now a great craze in the U.S. and Europe, published in most newspapers and magazines with championships and conventions all over. It's one of the few puzzles that can claim to be truly international by nature. It has no cultural baggage and just needs a logical mind to solve it.

'Sudoku' Characters

If you know the Japanese language you may know that the Su Doku characters are actually ones that originated from the Chinese language. These two characters have the same meaning in China (number single) but in Mandarin Chinese (pinyin) would be pronounced 'Shu du'. The written version of the characters tells a tale that goes back into the mists of history. The first character Shu is in two parts. The phonetic radical is lou consists of the two characters 'middle' above 'woman' and denotes 'leisure' (possibly represents a woman in the middle of nothing). The second part of Shu has 'strike' represented by a hand with a stick. These two parts together represent 'number' perhaps symbolising counting by scratching marks on the ground. The second character is the one for du or 'only'. It again has two parts the first symbol is for a dog and then a phonetic part (shu) which has no especial meaning. These two parts together represent 'only'.

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Today’s Quotation

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Thomas Fuller (Gnomologia) 1732

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