The history of Sudoku

Updated 2026-10-05

Before Sudoku: magic squares and Latin squares

Grids where every symbol appears once in each row and column are much older than Sudoku. Mathematicians call them Latin squares, and Leonhard Euler studied them in the 18th century. A finished Sudoku is a Latin square with one more rule: each 3×3 box also holds every digit once.

French newspapers printed close relatives of the puzzle in the 1890s. Le Siècle published a partly filled 9×9 magic square with 3×3 squares on 19 November 1892, and La France printed one on 6 July 1895 that it called a diabolical magic square.

Sources: Wikipedia: Latin square, Wikipedia: Sudoku

1979: Number Place in an American magazine

The modern puzzle first appeared in 1979, when Dell Magazines published it under the name Number Place. It was most likely designed by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle maker from Connersville, Indiana. The puzzle ran without his name; Will Shortz traced it to him in 2005 by checking the magazines' lists of contributors.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sudoku

1984: Japan gives it a name

Maki Kaji, the president of the puzzle company Nikoli, introduced the puzzle in Japan in April 1984 under the name Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, roughly "the digits must be single". The name was later shortened to Sudoku. In 1986 Nikoli settled on a house rule that the printed numbers in its puzzles sit in a symmetrical pattern.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sudoku, Nikoli: Sudoku

2004: the worldwide craze

Wayne Gould, a retired judge in Hong Kong, came across the puzzle in Tokyo in 1997 and spent six years writing software that makes Sudoku. He brought it to The Times in London, which launched it on 12 November 2004 under the name Su Doku. An American paper, the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire, had printed one of his puzzles a few months earlier, in September 2004.

The puzzle spread fast. By mid-2006, nearly every major newspaper in the United States was publishing a daily Sudoku.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sudoku

2005 onwards: television, championships and research

The British channel Sky One broadcast the first live television Sudoku show, Sudoku Live, on 1 July 2005, and later that year the BBC launched SUDO-Q, a game show that mixed Sudoku with general knowledge. The first World Sudoku Championship was held in Lucca, Italy, in 2006. In January 2012, Gary McGuire, Bastian Tugemann and Gilles Civario announced a computer-assisted proof that a standard 9×9 Sudoku with exactly one answer needs at least 17 givens.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sudoku, Guinness World Records: First television programme about Sudoku, Wikipedia: World Sudoku Championship, McGuire, Tugemann and Civario, There is no 16-Clue Sudoku (arXiv 1201.0749)

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