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

Sudoku Sudoku (; ; originally called Number Place) is a logic puzzle, logic-based, combinatorics, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and ...

.Zivan, David, ''Indianapolis Monthly'', March 2006, pp74-80

Invention of Number Place

Garns's colleagues at the Daggett architecture firm in

Indianapolis Indianapolis ( ), colloquially known as Indy, is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Indiana, most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana, Marion ...

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 Shortz, a crossword compiler for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', 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 Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...

'' of London.

Personal life

Garns was born in

Connersville Connersville is a city in Fayette County, Indiana, United States, east by southeast of Indianapolis. The population was 13,324 at the 2020 census. The city is the county seat of and the only incorporated town in the county. The city is in t ...

Indiana Indiana ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the s ...

, and by his teens had moved to Indianapolis with his father, W. H. Garns, an architect. He attended Indianapolis Technical High School and graduated in 1922. He entered the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

, 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

bespoke ''Bespoke'' () describes anything commissioned to a particular specification, altered or tailored to the customs, tastes, or usage of an individual purchaser. In contemporary usage, ''bespoke'' has become a general marketing and branding concep ...

suits and sported a thin moustache. He died of cancer on October 6, 1989, and was buried in

Crown Hill Cemetery Crown Hill Cemetery is a historic rural cemetery located at 700 West 38th Street in Indianapolis, Marion County, Indiana. The privately owned cemetery was established in 1863 at Strawberry Hill, whose summit was renamed "The Crown", a high poi ...

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garns, Howard 1905 births 1989 deaths Puzzle designers Burials at Crown Hill Cemetery Architects from Indianapolis People from Connersville, Indiana 20th-century American architects Arsenal Technical High School alumni