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| Photo: Professor David Nacin |
“It gets the students excited. It’s about making math fun,” Nacin says, with a contagious enthusiasm, citing a growing trend in his discipline – recreational math. “It’s a way to make math more popular and bring it to as many people as possible.”
Spring-boarding off that concept, Nacin just released his first book of puzzles – nine different types of puzzles he created that are spins on the popular Sudoku game, a game, Nacin says, that “doesn’t normally have enough math in it to be interesting.” Building upon the rules of Sudoku, Nacin introduces new challenges in his 9x9 puzzles by adding clues involving sums, means, and divisibility, among other mathematical operations. Yet another challenge: Unlike Sudoku, Nacin generally does not give away the value of any of his puzzle cells; players must start from scratch.
“You could say I’m bringing some real mathematics into a game that millions of people are already familiar with,” he explains of the puzzles in his book, aptly titled Math-Infused Sudoku: Puzzle Variants at All Levels of Difficulty.
Published by the American Mathematical Society, each of the book’s first eight chapters presents a mathematical rule system, followed by a series of puzzles based on rules in that system, progressing in difficulty from easy to hard. In the final chapter, the eight puzzle variants are combined into a single complex puzzle type that puts all of the reader’s new skills into play.
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| Math-infused Sudoku: Puzzle Variants at All Levels of Difficulty |
