Maki Kaji, who has died aged 69 of bile duct cancer, was a Japanese publisher who achieved international recognition as the “godfather of sudoku”. His puzzle magazine Nikoli paved the way for the 21st-century boom in pencil-and-paper number puzzles, examples of which appear daily in almost every newspaper around the world (including this one). He considered himself an entertainer, bringing joy and pleasure through numbers and logical thinking.
Maki launched Nikoli in 1980. A couple of years later he was flicking through an American puzzle magazine when his eyes landed on a puzzle called Number Place, which involved filling in a 9x9 grid with the digits from 1 to 9, such that each digit appears only once in each row and column. He spoke no English and it was the only puzzle he understood in the magazine.
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