It was said that a Swiss mathematician, Leonard Euler was the ¡§inventor¡¨ of Sudoku. But he did not publish it. He invented Latin Squares in 1783. (N x N grids which have all numbers from 1 to N appearing exactly once in each row and column), which in turn also had its roots linked on an ancient Chinese puzzle, Lo Shu. Sudoku¡¦s Japanese publisher Nikoli, brought the puzzle to Japan from the United States, which was then called Number Place.
Nikoli first introduced one puzzle in the paper. Monthly Nikolisk in April 1984: ¡§Suji wa dokushin ni Kagiru¡¨, which means ¡§the numbers must be single¡¨ / ¡§the numbers must only occur only once¡¨. The puzzle was named by Koji Maki, the president of Nikoli. Later, it was changed to Sudoku(¼Æ¿W). In 1986 Nikoli, introduced the 2 innovations: the number of givens must be no more than 30, the puzzles became ¡§symmetrical¡¨.
The puzzles are now published in mainstream Japanese Periodicals. In 1989, Soft disk publishing published DigitalHunt on the commodore 64.
Today the puzzle is sweeping across Europe and places in the states.