There is nothing obviously hasty about sudoku, that newspaper staple of the quiet coffee-break, but its name came about in a whirlwind, at least as puzzle-magazine publisher Maki Kaji told it. “My staff was pushing me to make up a name, and I wanted to go to horseracing that day, so I created the name in about 25 seconds,” he said in 2008.
Kaji, the “godfather of sudoku” who died from cancer on August 10, aged 69, quickly devised a Japanese phrase which he contracted to “sudoku”, meaning “single numbers”. The basic form of the puzzle involves filling in a nine-by-nine grid so that each row, column and small grid within contains the numbers one to nine only once. Those 25 seconds of inspiration have led to a global industry, with books, websites, clubs and even a world championship.
By 2005, when sudoku had become a hit in British newspapers, Kaji had already been in the puzzle business for years. A university dropout from Sapporo with a love of number puzzles, he had founded Nikoli (named after a racehorse) with two friends in 1980 to publish magazines with a variety of brain-testing grids, and four years later he came across number place, sudoku’s previous name, in a US magazine, which he tweaked and retitled.