History of Sudoku: Who Invented It and How It Went Global

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Published April 29, 2026 · Updated October 20, 2026

Sudoku is younger than it looks. The puzzle with today’s rules first ran in an American magazine in May 1979, as Number Place. A Tokyo publisher named it sudoku in 1984, and The Times of London turned it into a craze in November 2004. The timeline links each date to the source we took it from, and where two sources disagree we say so rather than pick one.

Three stories that get repeated a lot don’t survive the sources. Sudoku is not ancient. It did not start in Japan. And Leonhard Euler did not invent it in 1783: he wrote about Latin squares, the grids every sudoku is built on, in a paper published in 1782, and 1783 is the year he died.

Sudoku timeline: the key dates

Dates as the source gives them; a month or a day is shown only where the source states it. The exact day The Times began is left out because sources differ.

Who invented sudoku?

The best answer is Howard Garns, an architect from Indiana, although his name was never printed on the puzzle. Number Place first ran, unsigned, in the May 1979 issue of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. It was already the modern puzzle: a 9×9 grid split into nine 3×3 boxes, each digit once in every row, column and box.

The credit is a piece of detective work. In 2005 Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor, went through old Dell issues and found that Garns’s name was on the list of contributors whenever Number Place appeared and missing when it didn’t (Wikipedia, citing Ed Pegg Jr.’s 2005 column for the Mathematical Association of America). So the attribution is an inference, a strong one, not a signature. Garns was born in 1905 and died on 6 October 1989, fifteen years before the puzzle reached The Times.

Is sudoku Japanese?

The name is; the puzzle isn’t. Nikoli, the Tokyo puzzle publisher, says on its own sudoku page that it found the puzzle in an American puzzle magazine, where it was titled Number Place, and introduced it to Japanese readers in 1984. Its first Japanese title was Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which Nikoli translates as roughly “the number is limited to a single (unmarried) one”. That was too long, so it was cut to sudoku.

The man who coined it was Maki Kaji, the founder of Nikoli, which had launched Japan’s first puzzle magazine, also called Nikoli, in August 1980. When he died, on 10 August 2021 at 69, the company’s statement credited him with the name, as the Associated Press reported.

Nikoli also set the look of the puzzle. In 1986 it decided that the clues must be arranged in a symmetrical pattern, and it dates the puzzle’s big success in Japan from that change. Sudoku is a registered Nikoli trademark in Japan, which is why other Japanese publishers sell the same puzzle as Number Place.

Did sudoku come from Latin squares?

Mathematically yes; as a family tree, nobody has shown it. A Latin square is a grid in which each symbol appears once in every row and every column, and every finished sudoku is one, with the boxes as an extra rule. The name comes from Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), who used Latin letters as his symbols (Wikipedia: Latin square). His long memoir on them, Recherches sur une nouvelle espèce de quarrés magiques, was presented to the St Petersburg Academy in 1779 and published in 1782.

Latin squares are older than Euler’s paper, too. The Korean mathematician Choi Seok-jeong published one of order nine, the size of a sudoku grid, in 1700, as a step towards a magic square; Wikipedia cites the Handbook of Combinatorial Designs for it. Neither had the boxes, sudoku’s third rule. What that rule does to the number of possible grids is in our mathematics of sudoku.

The nearest miss came from two Paris newspapers. On 19 November 1892 Le Siècle printed a part-filled 9×9 magic square, but with two-digit numbers, so it needed arithmetic. On 6 July 1895 its rival La France printed a 9×9 grid whose rows, columns and broken diagonals each had to hold the numbers 1 to 9, with no boxes marked. Puzzles like it ran for about ten years and disappeared around the First World War (Wikipedia, citing the French researcher Christian Boyer). No source we found connects them to Garns.

How did sudoku become popular?

Through one visitor to a Tokyo bookshop. Wayne Gould, a New Zealander who had been a judge in Hong Kong, came across a sudoku book there in 1997. Over the next few years he wrote a computer program that made sudoku puzzles and rated their difficulty, and in November 2004 he persuaded The Times in London to print them, as Will Shortz told the story in Time’s 2006 list of the 100 most influential people, which included Gould. A reader’s letter printed on 13 November 2004 already complained that the puzzle had made him miss his Tube stop (Wikipedia, citing The Times).

The Daily Mail and several other British papers followed soon after, and the craze “really took off around May 2005”, as the word-watcher Michael Quinion noted that August on World Wide Words. By the time Shortz wrote his Time piece, in May 2006, nearly every major American newspaper was printing one every day. He was clear that Gould hadn’t invented it, only that he “had the genius to recognize its elemental, addictive appeal”.

The first World Sudoku Championship took place in Lucca, Italy, on 10 and 11 March 2006, and Jana Tylová of the Czech Republic won it. It has been held every year since, apart from 2020 and 2021.

How did computers change sudoku?

Shortz’s account turns on Gould’s program: it made puzzles and rated them, and a paper printing a fresh one every morning needs both. By March 2006 Gould was supplying 400 newspapers around the world, the Stamford Advocate reported. Nikoli has kept to the other side of the argument, and still says on its home page that “human-crafted puzzles will always have a special place”.

Computers also settled the mathematics. In 2005 Bertram Felgenhauer and Frazer Jarvis used one to count every completed 9×9 grid: 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 (Cornell Math Explorers’ Club). On 1 January 2012 Gary McGuire, Bastian Tugemann and Gilles Civario posted the result of an exhaustive computer search that found no puzzle with 16 clues and one solution, so 17 is the minimum. Our 17-clue sudoku page deals from a list of 49,158 such puzzles.

Our own puzzles are computer-made too, and they show what happens to Nikoli’s 1986 rule when nobody asks a program to keep it. The generator behind our sudoku page fills a grid, then takes digits out in a random order, keeping each removal only while the level’s solving steps can still finish the board. Nothing in that aims for a pattern.

Sudoku has grown a large family since, from killer cages to irregular jigsaw boxes; our list of sudoku variations covers the ones you can play here. The classic grid is the one Garns published in 1979, and our sudoku page deals it at six levels, Easy to Extreme.