Perhaps inevitably, sudoku puzzles are showing up in the mathematics classroom. Although these extremely popular puzzles don’t involve even arithmetic, they’re wonderful exercises in logic—and lend themselves to illuminating excursions into such mathematical topics as combinatorics, Latin squares, polyominoes, computer algorithms, chess problems, graph colorings, and permutation group theory.
This year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in New Orleans provided evidence of this interest in the form of a two-part session devoted to sudoku and other puzzles, organized by Laura Taalman of James Madison University.