Dead Maki Kaji, the father of Sudoku: he was 69 years old

Maki Kaji, considered the creator of the famous Sudoku number puzzle, died at the age of 69 after a battle with cancer. The news was given by his company, Nikoli of which he was executive director, explaining that the man died last August 10 in his home in Mitaka, near Tokyo. Known as “the godfather of sudoku”, Maki Kaji popularized the popular game, giving it the Japanese name in the 1980s which means “only solitary numbers allowed”. In fact, the game was invented in Europe in the 18th century by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. It is a grid of 9 rows and 9 columns, for a total of 81 cells, each of which can contain a number from 1 to 9, or be empty. The object of the game is to fill in the white boxes with numbers from 1 to 9 so that in each row, in each column and in each region all the digits from 1 to 9 are present, without repetition. Kaji didn’t register the name, so he didn’t make any money from the overwhelming success of the famous pastime. But he argued that the joy of a puzzle was more important than the financial gain. In one of his most famous BBC interviews in 2007, Kaji admitted that a new idea for a puzzle was “like finding a treasure”.