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

.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 state capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the seat of Marion County. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the consolidated population of Indianapolis and 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 William F. Shortz (born August 26, 1952) is an American puzzle creator and editor and crossword puzzle editor for ''The New York Times''. Early life and education Will Shortz was born and raised on an Arabian horse farm in Crawfordsville, Indi ...

, a crossword compiler for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', 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 daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'' of London.

Personal life

Garns was born in

Connersville Connersville is a city in Fayette County, east central Indiana, United States, east by southeast of Indianapolis. The population was 13,481 at the 2010 census. The city is the county seat of and the largest and only incorporated town in F ...

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th 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 (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

, 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 The word ''bespoke'' () has evolved from a verb meaning 'to speak for something', to its contemporary usage as an adjective. Originally, the adjective ''bespoke'' described tailor-made suits and shoes. Later, it described anything commissioned t ...

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