What a delightful surprise, one sunny day, to discover a full page of "genuinely" mathematical games in Tunis's French-language daily La Presse, or, in the 2000s, to see a Sudoku grid for the first time in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, when the puzzle was not yet widespread in France! Although mathematical games could inspire many readers to enjoy mathematics, they appear only in monthly magazines labelled "science"; many mainstream weeklies and dailies remain wary of them. Only a few dare to take the gamble—often successfully, as it happens.
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Early games: for insiders ----------------------------
From the Renaissance onward, mathematicians routinely challenged one another, sometimes even issuing challenges to the public through posters or public contests. More often, however, the problems stayed within a small circle of mathematicians and were circulated chiefly in correspondence or published collections. The Icosian game, devised in 1857 by the Irish mathematician and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton—in which the aim is to find a route along the edges of a regular dodecahedron that visits every vertex exactly once—was even presented at a mathematics conference. Although this three-dimensional puzzle was marketed with a string tied to one vertex and wound around the model to trace the route, games of this kind long remained available only to a limited audience. The press could be a valuable way to popularize mathematics through games, yet pages devoted to this brain sport appear chiefly in monthly science magazines, as though such intellectual games were reserved for insiders.
One of the first to submit problems to the press was the British mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), remembered for the problems he regularly posed in the Educational Times (see FOCUS "One of Sylvester's problems"). Whether devised by Hamilton or Sylvester, most of these problems later became genuine subjects of study: mathematicians explored, developed and generalized them extensively, sometimes advancing scientific fields such as graph theory.