Howard Garns (March 2, 1905 - October 6, 1989) was an American architect who gained fame only after his death as the creator of Number Place, the number puzzle that became a worldwide phenomenon under the name
Sudokuis a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 boxes contains the digits from 1 to 9 only one time each. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid...
.
Garns's colleagues at the Daggett architecture firm in Indianapolis recall the designer working on the game on one of the company's drawing boards. George Wiley, a draftsman for the firm between 1957 and 1967, told
Indianapolis Monthly: "We had two extra drawing boards and one day Howard was sitting over there.
Howard Garns (March 2, 1905 - October 6, 1989) was an American architect who gained fame only after his death as the creator of Number Place, the number puzzle that became a worldwide phenomenon under the name
Sudokuis a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 boxes contains the digits from 1 to 9 only one time each. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid...
.
Invention of Number Place
Garns's colleagues at the Daggett architecture firm in Indianapolis recall the designer working on the game on one of the company's drawing boards. George Wiley, a draftsman for the firm between 1957 and 1967, told
Indianapolis Monthly: "We had two extra drawing boards and one day Howard was sitting over there. I walked over and asked what he was working on and he said, 'Oh, a game'. It looked like a crossword puzzle but it had numbers. It had little squares. I walked around on his side and he covered it up. It was a secret."
Robert Hindman, another draftsman at the firm, corroborated the story. "I saw sketches and I thought it was a crossword puzzle, but I wasn't really interested in it," he said. "But it was his thing. He just loved doing it."
Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, which first published Number Place in May 1979, did not publish Garns's byline on the puzzle. However,
Will ShortzWill Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor.-Early life:Will Shortz was born and raised on an Arabian horse farm in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Graduating from Indiana University in 1974, he is the only person known to hold a college degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles, after...
, a crossword compiler for the
New York Times, discovered that Garns's name appeared in the list of contributors at the front of the magazine whenever Number Place appeared, and was absent from all other editions.
Garns was alive when Number Place, renamed Su Doku, became popular in Japan in the mid-1980s, but died before it became an international phenomenon in November 2004, when it was printed by
The TimesThe Times is a daily national newspaper published in the United Kingdom since 1785 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register....
of London.
Biography
Garns was born in Connersville,
IndianaIndiana is a U.S. state, the 19
th admitted to the Union. It is located in the Great Lakes region, and with approximately 6.3 million residents, is ranked 16
th in population and 17
th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38
th in land area, and is the...
, and by his teens had moved to Indianapolis with his father, W. H. Garns, an architect. He attended Indianapolis Technical High School (now known as
Arsenal Technical High SchoolArsenal Technical High School is a public high school in Indianapolis, Indiana. Established in 1912, the school consists of a campus east of downtown Indianapolis and is the only such type school in Indiana. The school was originally a U.S. Arsenal, which was closed after the American Civil War....
or Tech High School) and graduated in 1922. He entered the
University of IllinoisThe University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a public research university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the oldest and largest campus in the University of Illinois system....
, and received a Bachelor of Science in architectural engineering in 1926. He worked for his father's firm until the Second World War, when he became a captain in the US Army Corps of Engineers. He joined the Daggett architecture firm after the war.
According to friends, he always looked sharp in
bespokeBespoke is a term employed in a variety of applicationsto mean an item custom-made to the buyer's specification.While applied to many items now,from computer software to luxury car appointments,...
suits and sported a thin moustache.
He succumbed to cancer on October 6, 1989, and is buried in
Crown Hill Cemetery-History:Crown Hill Cemetery was dedicated on 1 June, 1864 both to provide for the large number of American Civil War soldiers from Indiana who had died in the war as well as to provide for the crowding problems in the small 25 acre cemetery for the growing city of Indianapolis...
, Indianapolis.