Maki Kaji, the man who popularized Sudoku by giving it its Japanese name in the 1980s, has died at the age of 69, his publishing house announced on Tuesday, August 17.
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“
Kaji-san, known as the man who gave Sudoku its name, was loved by puzzle enthusiasts around the world
”, we can read on the website of the Nikoli publishing house, which he founded. .
He died on August 10 of biliary cancer, the press release read.
A game discovered in a magazine
The original concept of the game, the Latin Square, was invented in the 18th century in Europe by a Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler.
Its modern version, different because of its subdivision into nine squares of nine boxes, was discovered in the early 1980s in an American magazine by Maki Kaji, who then imported it to Japan.
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Finding a new puzzle is "
like finding a treasure,
" Maki told the BBC in 2007. It was he who gave it its Japanese name in Sudoku, a contraction of the phrase "
the numbers must be alone
", of which the two Chinese characters can be translated as "
lonely numbers
".
The game spread around the world when Wayne Gould, a retired judge from Hong Kong and fan of patience games, decided in 1997, after discovering Sudoku in Japan, to write a computer program that generated puzzles. Sudoku.
The Sudoku player must complete a 9 by 9 grid (81 squares) with numbers ranging from 1 to 9 so that none appear twice in the same row, in the same column or in the same sub-square. .
