Though sudoku seemed to achieve ubiquity overnight in 2005, the puzzle has actually been around for decades. So-called magic squares were an occasional pastime among smarties during the days of Ben Franklin, who enjoyed the puzzles. If you get stuck with this Samurai Sudoku, you might want to try with blackjack or one of jackpotjoy's fun bingo game and then return for some more. According to The New York Times, 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler studied conundrums called Latin squares, which involved plugging the same set of numbers into each row and column in a grid. Two hundred years after Euler, in 1979, retired American architect Howard Garns contributed puzzles titled Number Place for publication by Connecticut-based crossword giant Dell Magazines. Number Place added a key element to Latin squares, the nine boxes within the overall grid. |