In reality, Sudoku is an ancient tradition of our never-ending love affair with mathematics. Traceable through Europe, India, the Middle East, and China over the centuries, these puzzles that appear in our daily newspapers, on bookstore shelves, and across the Internet once had thoroughly mystical significance and now serve as pleasant, day-to-day entertainment.
Magic Squares in China and Persia
While no one knows the exact origin of our number-and-box system through which Sudoku puzzles are made, the first documentation of this idea could be found in China two thousand years ago. The Chinese had a fascination for ‘magic squares,’ the earliest known forerunner of Sudoku. It involved arranging numbers into rows and columns, with each row, column, and diagonal totaling to an equal sum. These diagrams did not permit repetition like modern Sudoku puzzles. Numbers were most frequently used, but other symbols such as letters were also possible.
Thought to have the power of prophecy, magic squares became significant in the I Ching book of wisdom and divination. They eventually passed through India and found their way to the Arab world, capturing the imaginations of leading thinkers. Thabit ibn Qurra, a famous Mesopotamian physician, astronomer, and mathematician, discussed magic square concepts in the early ninth century. A later group of scholars called Ikhwan al-Safa (meaning ‘Brethren of Purity’) compiled an encyclopedia sometime around 990 that lists possible magic square combinations, using widths of three to nine cells.
Magic squares had a wide popularity in the Middle East and were considered both therapeutic and spiritual. The Jabirian Corpus, a collection of writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, discusses magic squares of nine cells using the numbers 1 through 9 with 5 in the center so that all rows, columns, and diagonals total 15. Jabir, a gifted physician, went far enough to recommend magic squares as comfort for women in childbirth. Squares of varying size were created in his lifetime and their flawless logic gave them talismanic qualities.
Reaching the West
It is equally uncertain where and when magic squares first arrived to the West. A Spanish rabbi named Abraham-ben-Meir Aben-Ezra, a famous translator of Arabic texts with an interest in numerology, may have helped in introducing the squares to Europe during the 12th century. Magic squares evolved through the Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods into ‘Latin squares’ that, unlike the original magic square design, repeated symbols.
The term ‘Latin squares’ was coined by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, who discussed the formation of magic and Latin squares in 18th-century treatises. For years, Euler grappled with the problem of square-building that did not comply with mathematical theory; it was a dilemma not truly overcome until the advent of computers.
The modern Sudoku puzzle originates from this Latin squares framework, with the exception of its nine-square interior regions that must also contain the digits 1 through 9. This format is credited to Howard Garns, an Indianapolis architect who took an interest in Euler’s ideas during the 1960s. His creations first appeared in 1979 Dell puzzle magazines under the title Number Place, a name still used today. Garns watched the puzzles increase in popularity but died in 1989, years before their worldwide recognition.
Becoming ‘Sudoku’
Nikoli, a publishing firm in Japan, saw potential in using Garns’s design. With minor changes, they first published Number Place as ‘Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru’ (‘the numbers must remain single’) and later as ‘Sudoku’ - ‘Su’ meaning ‘number’ and ‘doku’ meaning ‘singular’ or ‘unique.’ The puzzles, first circulated in 1984, were an immediate success amongst Japanese readers, whose language of characters (as opposed to letters) is not accommodating to crosswords.
There Sudoku remained for over a decade, before New Zealander Wayne Gould fell upon a book of Sudoku puzzles while in Tokyo. Immediately under the Sudoku spell, he devised a computer program that constructs puzzles at the press of a few keys. One of his puzzles was released by the Times of London in November 2004, giving birth to the international Sudoku craze. Competing newspapers in Britain released their own versions of Sudoku and it spread internationally. Its success has drawn comparisons to that of the Rubik’s Cube in the early 1980s.
Sudoku did not originate in Japan, contrary to what its name suggests. But Sudoku has become so popular worldwide that its origins may not really matter in the end. The puzzle is a true breaker of barriers, solvable and enjoyable by any nationality, age group, and level of knowledge. It requires no particular toil or strain of mind, yet is judged by clinicians as helpful in both reinforcing thought and slowing memory loss experienced in old age.
Aside from mental health benefits, Sudoku lovers are taking part in a phenomenon that has lasted for centuries in different parts of the world. Its nine digits remain deceptively simple.
Sources
Delahaye, Jean-Paul. ‘The Science behind Sudoku.’ Scientific American, June 2006;294(6): 80-7.
Hoffman, Mike. ‘Leonhard Euler.’ United States Naval Academy web site, 2003.
‘Jabir ibn Hayyan.’ Wikipedia article, 2011 [via Internet].
Smith, David. ‘So you thought Sudoku came from the Land of the Rising Sun ...’ The Observer, 15 May 2005.
‘Sudoku history.’ Conceptis Puzzles web site, 1997-2010.
‘Sudoku origins.’ Sudoku Dragon web site, 2005-10.
‘Thabit ibn Qurra.’ Wikipedia article, 2011 [via Internet].
Paul-John Ramos - Paul-John is a freelance writer based in Yonkers, New York. His past articles have appeared at Classical Net and his poetry in Steam ...
