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of number-square fascination. The idea came to him as he was browsing an American puzzle magazine. As a non-English-speaker, he scanned pages of incomprehensible word games before stopping when he came across an intriguing-looking grid of numbers. The puzzle, entitled ‘Number Place’, was a partially completed 9 × 9 Latin square that used the digits 1 to 9. Based on the rules that each number was allowed to appear only once per row and per column, the would-be solver needed to figure out how to fill in the missing gaps using a process of logical deduction. Solvers were aided by a further condition: the square was divided into nine 3 × 3 subsquares, each of which was marked in bold. Each number 1–9 was allowed only once per subsquare. Kaji solved Number Place and got excited – this was precisely the sort of puzzle he wanted to put in his new magazine.

Number Place, which had made its first appearance in 1979, was the creation of Howard Garns, a retired architect and puzzle enthusiast from Indiana. Though he enjoyed solving Garns’s puzzle, Kaji decided to redesign it so that the numbers provided were distributed in a symmetrical pattern around the grid, matching the format used for crosswords. He called his version Sudoku, the Japanese for ‘the number must appear only once’.

Sudoku appeared in the early issues of Kaji’s puzzle magazine, which launched in 1980, but Kaji said it attracted no attention. It was only once the puzzle travelled overseas that it spread like wildfire.

Just as a Japanese-speaker with no English could understand Number Place, so an English-speaker with no Japanese could understand Sudoku. In 1997 a New Zealander named Wayne Gould walked into a bookstore in Tokyo. Although he was initially disoriented by the fact that everything was in Japanese, his eyes eventually landed on something familiar. He saw a book cover with what looked like a crossword grid with numbers on it, and though the image was obviously some kind of puzzle, he didn’t instantly understand the rules. Stll, he bought the book, thinking he’d figure it out later. On a holiday in southern Italy he worked backwards until he cracked the puzzle. Gould had just retired from being a judge in Hong Kong and was teaching himself how to program computers, so he decided he would try to write a program that generated Sudokus. A top programmer might take a couple of days for this task. It took Gould six years.

But the effort was worth it, and in September 2004 he persuaded New Hampshire’s Conway Daily Sun to publish one of his puzzles. It was an immediate success. The following month he decided to approach the British national press. Gould thought the most effective way to pitch his idea was to present a mock-up of that day’s paper with the Sudoku already in it. He knew enough about forgery from covering trials in Hong Kong to make a convincing fake of The Times’s second section, and took it to the paper’s head office. After waiting a few hours in reception, Gould showed them his dummy paper, and they seemed to like it. In fact, immediately after he left, a Times executive sent Gould an email asking him not to show the Sudoku puzzles to anyone else. Two weeks later the puzzle first appeared, and three days after that, the Daily Mail introduced its own version. In January 2005 the Daily Telegraph joined the game, and not long afterwards every British newspaper had to have a daily puzzle to keep up with the competition. That same year the Independent reported a 700 percent rise in UK pencil sales, and attributed it to the craze. By summer, shelves of Sudoku books appeared in bookshops, newsagents and airports, and not just in the UK but around the world. At one point in 2005 six of the top 50 books on USA Today’s bestseller list were Sudoku titles. By the end of the year the puzzle had spread to 30 countries, and Time magazine named Wayne Gould one of the 100 people who most shaped the world that year, along with Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney. By the end of 2006, Sudokus were being published in 60 countries; and by the end of 2007,