Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

It has come to our attention that there exists the potential for confusion about the origins of Sudoku, the logic puzzle that's sweeping across the world faster than a New South Wales brush fire eats up the suburbs of Sydney. It's the Japanese angle that concerns us. Not that we have anything against the people of Japan, we hasten to add. This is about accuracy and origins. Back on 19 May, The Economist, that pinnacle of exactness, published a piece on "The business of brain teasers" titled "Do you sudoku?" An excerpt:

"Sudoku, an old puzzle long popular in Japan is fast gaining popularity the world over. In Britain, a sudoku book is a bestseller and national newspapers are competing feverishly to publish the most, and the most fiendish, puzzles. (Last week the Guardian printed a board on every page of one day's features section.) Meanwhile, the puzzle is being published in newspapers from Australia to Croatia to America. The Japanese buy more than 600,000 sudoku magazines a month. Even the New York Times is considering introducing sudoku in its Sunday magazine, alongside its venerated crossword."

Would that paragraph lead you to believe that Sudoku is Japanese in origin? It's just that four days before The Economist article appeared, the Observer ran a piece titled "So you thought Sudoku came from the Land of the Rising Sun ..." Here's how it began:

"Numerous articles have attributed the puzzle, which has a Japanese name, to the mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun. But its true modern origins lie with a team of puzzle constructors in 1970s' New York, from where it set off on a 25-year journey to Tokyo, London — and back to New York."

Like The Economist, the Observer credits Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, who devised the puzzle 'Latin Squares' in 1783, with starting the numbers grid game that became Sudoku. Two hundred years later on the other side of the Atlantic:

"The realisation that this could become a popular phenomenon was made in Manhattan, New York in the late 1970s by Dell Puzzle Magazines, which has been producing crosswords and other puzzles since 1931. Its editor-in-chief, Abby Taylor, who joined in 1980, said: 'No one knows exactly when it started or who devised it, but the oldest copy I can find in our archive is 1979. We called the puzzle Number Place and still do today.' "

The clear loser in the great grid game is Dell Puzzle Magazines, which has been unable to cash in on the craze. The clear winner is Wayne Gould, a a New Zealander who practised law in Hong Kong and who developed the Sudoku software that powers so many puzzles around the globe. He's going to net $1m this year from sales and royalties. Meanwhile, Handelsblatt, Germany's leading business daily, is now with the progam. Sudoku is simply unstoppable.