August 16, 2005
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Narrative and Latin Squares
From The Independent, 15 August 2005:
“Millions of people now enjoy Sudoku puzzles. Forget the pseudo-Japanese
baloney: sudoku grids are a version of the Latin Square created by the
great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the late 18th century.”
The Independent was discussing the conference on “Mathematics and Narrative” at Mykonos in July.
From the Wikipedia article on Latin squares:
“The popular Sudoku puzzles are a special case of Latin squares; any solution to a Sudoku puzzle is a Latin square. Sudoku imposes the additional restriction that 3×3 subgroups must also contain the digits 1–9 (in the standard version).
The Diamond 16 Puzzle illustrates a generalized concept of Latin-square orthogonality: that of “orthogonal squares” (Diamond Theory, 1976) or “orthogonal matrices”– orthogonal, that is, in a combinatorial, not a linear-algebra sense (A. E. Brouwer, 1991).”
This last paragraph, added to Wikipedia on Aug. 14, may or may not survive the critics there.
