Tokyo: The man dubbed the “Sudoku Father” because of his role in popularizing numerical braineasers who were loved by millions of people, had died of cancer at the age of 69 years, his Japanese publisher had announced.
In the notification posted on Monday, Nikoli said Maki Kaji died at home on August 10 after fighting cancer, and warning services will be held later on.
“Mr.
Kaji is known as the Father of Sudoku and loved by puzzle fans around the world,” said the publisher in a statement on his website.
Sudoku, a kind of numeric crossword, was found by Swiss Mathematician Leonhard Euler in the 18th century.
The modern version is sometimes said to have been formulated in the United States, but the Assessment is credited with popularizing the puzzle.
He was also said to come with the name Sudoku, the contraction of the Japanese phrase which means “every number must be single”.
Sudoku demands players to place the number one to nine in a box consisting of 81 boxes, so there are no numbers repeated in nine vertical or horizontal lines.
To complicate more things, the grid is also divided into nine blocks that contain nine single boxes, and each block must also contain one to nine numbers.
Regardless of the Japanese name, the original concept of the Latin box, a grid where each number or symbol occurs once in each line dreamed in the 18th century by Euler.
Nicoli saw the version in the American magazine in the 1980s and took him to Japan, where Sudoku was born.
It entered Europe and the United States a few decades later, with the BBC England in 2005 wrote about the puzzle that “began a gentle attack on last year’s nation, and can now be found in four national newspapers”.
Kaji told the BBC in 2007 that creating a new puzzle like “finding treasure”.
“It’s not about whether it will make money.
Pure excitement tries to finish it.”