Japan: Maki Kaji, the “father of Sudoku”, died at 69 – franceinfo

Maki Kaji, the man who popularized Sudoku by giving it its Japanese name in the 1980s, died on August 10 of cancer at the age of 69, his publishing house announced Monday (August 16th). “Kaji-san, known as the man who gave Sudoku its name, was loved by puzzle enthusiasts around the world”, can we read on the site of the Nikoli publishing house, which he founded.

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.

Finding a new puzzle is “like finding a treasure”, Maki Kaji told the BBC in 2007. Sudoku is the contraction of the phrase “the numbers must be alone”.

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. this game.