Maki Kaji, "Father of Japanese Sudoku", dies

Maki Kaji, the man who gave the Japanese game Sudoku its name in the 1980s, has died at the age of 69, his publishing house announced.

"Kage-san, who is known to have given the game Sudoku its Japanese name, was loved by puzzle enthusiasts all over the world," said Nikolai's website.

He died on August 10 of bile duct cancer, according to the statement.

The original concept of the game, called the Latin square, was invented in the 18th century in Europe by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

The contemporary version of this game, different from the original due to subdivisions of nine squares by nine boxes, was discovered by Maki Kaji in the 1980s in an American magazine and brought to Japan and contributed to its popularity.

In statements he made to the BBC in 2007, he said that finding a new puzzle "is like finding a treasure."

He gave it its Japanese name "Sudoku", which is an abbreviation for "every number should be alone."

The game gained worldwide popularity when Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge who loves patience-testing games, created software that creates "Sudoku" networks in 1997, after learning about the game in Japan.

The Sudoku player must complete a grid of nine digits in width and length (81 digits in total) with numbers ranging from one to nine so that the same number does not appear twice in the same line, column, or sub-square.