In a house with 4 kids who go to 3 different schools, weekday mornings can be hectic. Breakfast must be eaten. Backpacks must be packed. Lunches must be made. Pajamas must be traded for school clothes. The majority of my kids are relatively self-sufficient, but I still need to be available to monitor the morning progress if I want everyone out the door and to school on time. So the busyness of the morning makes completing the newspaper puzzles fairly difficult.
Since my older sister homeschools her 4 kids, her mornings are a little less hectic (but the rest of the day is pretty busy!). Therefore, she prioritizes her morning time and her newspaper puzzles. She has told me, “I do the top left scramble, then the sudoku, the bottom scramble, the crossword and then the cryptoquote. Brain work!!” She said that the first 4 puzzles are her prep work for the tricky and often perplexing code-breaking exercise of the cryptoquote.
If I do get around to completing any puzzles, I usually only do the sudoku puzzles on Mondays and Tuesdays. This is not because those are our less crazy days of the week. It’s actually because I’m aware of my limitations. The difficulty of each sudoku puzzle is noted with a number of stars. Monday is usually a 1-star and Tuesday is a 2-star. I’m just not willing to devote the amount of effort to a puzzle that’s more difficult than that. Call it lazy or call it self-awareness, but it’s true.
According to sudokudragon.com, the name sudoku is “abbreviated from the Japanese suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which means ‘the numbers must occur only once.’” Because of its name, many might assume the sudoku puzzle is a Japanese invention, but there’s a lot more to its origin story.
It started out as the invention of a Swiss mathematician named Leonhard Euler in the late 1700’s. It eventually made its way to French newspapers between 1890-1920. Then the puzzle showed up in an American magazine in 1979. By the 1980’s, Japan started printed the eventually-named Sudoku puzzles in their magazines and newspapers. The Japanese people love a good puzzle as much as anyone but found that the structure of their language and lettering made it difficult to construct a Japanese crossword puzzle. A number puzzle worked much better for them.
For those who don’t really care for newspaper puzzles, the history of the sudoku might seem as mind-numbingly boring as actually completing a sudoku puzzle, but there’s an interesting evolution to its existence and popularity. This grid made up of 81 boxes and a few well-placed numbers, has changed over the last 250+ years as it was altered by various cultures. Instead of keeping it just so, when a new group discovered it, they would look to make it better or more challenging or more universally appealing.
Though the name Su Doku means “number single,” its persistence in so many diverse places shows its multiplicity. It’s an excellent example of the melting pot theory. Learning from and sharing what we love with others can create some pretty amazing things.
