Sudoku Challenge

I love the British. They keep abreast of the most interesting current events.

It's been a long standing habit of myself and others to believe that we are well informed if we read the N.Y.Times and the Washington Post every day. While that once may have been true, it no longer applies. These major news journals currently play tag with each other's headlines and rarely feature more than 2-3 major breaking stories. Hash and re-hash is the trend of the day.

Take the case of Sudoku, a Japanese number puzzle, for instance. While I've been a regular reader of both the Times and the Post for years, I can honestly say, it wasn't until this morning while reading The Guardian ( a British newspaper) that I stumbled across Sudoku for the first time.

The Brits believe they need more high calibre math teachers. While America needs the very same commodity, we are not recruiting potential teachers in quite the same fashion that the Brits employ. Possibly, life would be more interesting if we did.

In London, Norwich, Leicester, Liverpool and Newcastle, 3-metre high Sudoku puzzle boards have been erected to titillate the interest of secondary math teachers.

At each roadshow displaying the Sudoku boards around the country, the challenge's winner's names will be drawn from a hat and each winner will be awarded $500 pounds, plus a matching $500 pounds will be given to the math department of the school of the winner's choice.

The Japanese number puzzle is a grid containing nine rows which each contain nine squares. To solve the puzzle each row, vertically and horizontally, must contain the numbers 1-9. That's all there is to it. There's no math involved and nothing has to add up to anything else.

The puzzles are solved with reasoning and logic.

For further information on Sudoku puzzles, Google has 83 Million sites dedicated to this subject!
Sudoku Challenge © 2006 Chaeli Lee Sullivan