Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.

According to Wikipedia:

The puzzle was designed anonymously by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor, and first published in 1979. Although likely inspired by the Latin square invention of Leonhard Euler, Garns added a third dimension (the regional restriction) to the mathematical construct and (unlike Euler) presented the creation as a puzzle, providing a partially-completed grid and requiring the solver to fill in the rest. The puzzle was first published in New York by the specialist puzzle publisher Dell Magazines in its magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the title Number Place (which we can only assume Garns named it).
The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which can be translated as "the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once" literally means "single; celibate; unmarried"). The puzzle was named by Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli. At a later date, the name was abbreviated to Sudoku, pronounced SUE-dough-coo; sū = number, doku = single); it is a common practice in Japanese to take only the first kanji of compound words to form a shorter version. In 1986, Nikoli introduced two innovations which guaranteed the popularity of the puzzle: the number of givens was restricted to no more than 32 and puzzles became "symmetrical" (meaning the givens were distributed in rotationally symmetric cells). It is now published in mainstream Japanese periodicals, such as the Asahi Shimbun. Within Japan, Nikoli still holds the trademark for the name Sudoku; other publications in Japan use alternative names.

Now that I got the history out of the way let me explain the phenomenon. It started in November 2004 in “The Times” in Britain after Wayne Gould created a program to develop the puzzles quickly. It caught like wild fire from there, eventually reaching the States in May 2005 when the “New York Post” first published it. Now almost every city’s newspaper features the puzzle. I noticed it began being published in the Continental Airlines in-flight magazine last month as well. The question is, is it a fad? Or is Sudoku here to stay?

A friend of mine thinks it is a phase. Then again, he can complete the USA Today crossword puzzle every day whereas I’m lucky to get 1/3 of it done (I’m really not that strong in vocabulary). He claims, “It’s reached its peak. People will get tired of the lack of variety in the puzzles.” Maybe so. But maybe he’s just jealous that the puzzle is infringing on his precious crossword space in the paper. I don’t know for sure.

I think it is going to be around for quite awhile. Why? Because it is a logic puzzle. The people (like me) that are not linguists can look at this and solve it. You don’t have to know the dictionary nor the silly little puns that these crossword publishers like to use. If you can write the numbers one through nine, you can solve this puzzle. Granted some may take longer to solve, but they can be done. So from me to you…happy solving!