We owe him for making Sudoku a worldwide phenomenon.
Maki Kaji, who popularized the game by giving it its Japanese name in the 1980s, is dead, Nikoli, his publisher, has announced.
He was 69 years old.
The statement said his death dates back to August 10.
He died of cancer of the bile ducts.
The original concept of Sudoku, the Latin square, was invented in the 18th century by the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler.
Its modern version, different because of its subdivision into nine squares of nine boxes, was discovered in the early 1980s in an American magazine by Maki Kaji, who then imported it to Japan.
"Lonely numbers"
It was he who gave it its Japanese name Sudoku, a contraction of the phrase "the numbers must be alone", the two Chinese characters of which can be translated as "solitary numbers".
The game spread around the world when Wayne Gould, a retired judge from Hong Kong and fan of patience games, decided in 1997, after discovering Sudoku in Japan, to write a computer program that generated grids. of Sudoku.
The player must complete a grid of nine squares by nine squares, made up of sub-squares of three squares by three squares with numbers ranging from 1 to 9. Care must be taken that a number does not appear twice on the same row, in the same column or the same sub-square.
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