Ram Murty

Queen's math professor Ram Murty has been widely lauded for his work in algebraic and analytic number theory and has been published in an array of mathematics journals. But he's never had as much attention as he has be attracting recently, since he and fellow Queen's math professor Agnes Herzberg became the first to explore potential mathematical connections to the popular number puzzle game Sudoku.
Both Sudoku fans, for fun they decided to study the potential mathematical connections to the game, which has players fill a nine-by-nine grid so that each column and row and three-by-three box contains the numbers one to nine. "We came up with probably the first definitive mathematical theory of the puzzle," Murty said. "We analysed it from a mathematical perspective and found beautiful connections to other parts of mathematics, for example, graph theory, number theory, probability theory, statistics." Their research was published in the June/July issue of the American Mathematical Society's journal Notices. Using graph theory, the math professors systematically analysed Sudoku puzzles and found the theory behind them could be used in a wide array of practical applications, including analysing communications networks and airline schedules. The pair also determined that working on Sudoku puzzles improves people's math skills because the game is essentially a math problem. "There are some logical skills that people are unlocking when they're solving a Sudoku puzzle," Murty said. "There are logical skills, combinational skills that come out." Murty finds it amusing that the research he and Herzberg did for fun has garnered so much attention, but he said he's happy to see that Sudoku's popularity has inspired more Canadians to work on their math skills. He urges math-a-phobics who find the numbers game intimidating to persevere. After all, he said, even the average mathematician takes 30 minutes to an hour to solve one of the simpler Sudoku puzzles. "Everyone has an innate mathematical ability," he said. "It just has to be brought out and in some way Sudoku does that."