Teasing our brains with complex number puzzle

We keep finding ways of occupying ourselves during the current crisis. Terry Redhead has always been a fan of quizzes, crosswords and Sudokus. Here he looks at the history of those pesky number grids and their 9x9 problems.

- Terry Redhead

Now I don’t know about you, but the lockdown has seen me spend even more time doing crosswords, brain teasers and Sudokus.

And here at Let’s Talk we know just how popular these brain teasers are with you, which is why we continue to publish six pages of ‘Brain Workout’ every issue.

The Redhead household cannot resist a Sudoku, crossword or any other puzzles. Throughout lockdown, modern technology has allowed us to have family quizzes twice a week. I would love to say I won but, as always with Let’s Talk, we have to tell the truth!

But it got me to wondering about the history of Sudokus? Did you know they first appeared in this country in 2004?

Number puzzles appeared in newspapers in the late 19th Century, when French puzzle setters began experimenting with removing numbers from ‘magic squares’ grids.

Le Siècle, a Paris daily newspaper, published a partially completed 9×9 magic square with 3×3 sub-squares on November 19, 1892. It was not a sudoku because it contained double-digit numbers and required arithmetic knowledge rather than logic to solve, but it shared key characteristics: each row, column and sub-square added up to the same number.