THE craze for Sudoku puzzles gripped the Japanese in the 1980s and has captivated the British since 2004, but the first obsession with the fiendish number grids took place more than a hundred years ago in 19th-century France.

A French mathematician has discovered that his countrymen were in thrall to Sudoku 109 years before the puzzles were first published in Britain by The Times, and 84 years before their supposed invention in 1979.

While the front pages of French newspapers were taken up with stories on the Dreyfus Affair and the Lumière brothers’ invention of the cinema, the inside pages introduced a new kind of brain-teaser.

The first known Sudoku appeared in La France on July 6, 1895. M B. Meyniel, an unknown puzzle setter, created a grid nine squares by nine requiring solvers to fill in the blanks with numbers from one to nine.

He did not mark sub-squares measuring three squares by three, but solvers who drew on their own lines would find that each block containted all the numbers from one to nine. Meyniel added one extra twist - sets of diagonal lines must add up to 45.

The earliest Sudoku, printed by La France in its Divertissements Quotidiens (daily brain-teasers) section, is reprinted above for readers to solve.

Seasoned puzzlers should not have any difficulty, but they should be careful to remember that broken diagonal lines, such as the ones highlighted, must add up to 45.

If they tackle it as a plain Sudoku they will find there are two solutions.

Christian Boyer, who discovered the puzzle, said that mainstream newspapers such as Le Siècle and L’Echo de Paris competed to create better models for the puzzle in the 1890s. Le Siècle created a similar grid in November 1892, but used double-digit numbers instead of the familiar one to nine.

The craze continued until the First World War. Newspapers dropped them, either because they were deemed too frivolous or because the public had grown tired of them.

The puzzle was not revived until 1979, when Howard Garns, a retired American architect, created “number place” for the New York magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games.

The puzzles were reprinted in Japan in 1984 and became known as “sudoku”, an abbreviation of the Japanese for “numbers must only occur once”.

La France and Le Siècle both closed down in the 1930s, but French national newspapers revisited Sudoku last year after The Times reintroduced the puzzle to Europe in November 2004.

M Boyer — who published his research in the June issue of Pour La Science, the French edition of Scientific American — said that Le Figaro now regularly carries the puzzle.

“The puzzles’ international success really started thanks to the New Zealander Wayne Gould, who published them in The Times,” he said.

It is not clear how the French were originally inspired by the puzzle, but it is likely to have been influenced by the work of Leonhard Euler, the Swiss mathematician who invented the “latin square” in 1782. Latin squares are similar to Su Dokus, but are not divided into sub-squares.

M Boyer added that 19th century Frenchmen would solve only one puzzle a week rather than today’s daily problems.







FRENCH FIRSTS





Manned hot air balloon Montgolfier brothers were the first to send people safely into the sky, in 1783

Braille Louis Braille created the language of raised dots in 1829

Margarine Invented by Mège Mouriés in 1869

Cinema First public screening of the motion picture, by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895

Aqualung Invented in 1943 by Jacques Cousteau

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