GREAT MINDS LOVE GAMES

Doing a crossword or a Sudoku every day to keep your mind sharp may seem like a recent concept. In fact, people have been challenging their brains with puzzles as far back as 3,600 years ago, when the ancient Egyptians developed math problems on papyrus and wooden tablets. Here are some other fun facts about brain games in history:

■ The first crossword puzzle was printed in the Newyorkworld on December 21, 1913, but not everyone was a fan. In 1924, the Newyorktimes described crosswords as a “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern.” (The Times didn’t publish its first crossword until 1942.)

■ Sudoku means “single number” in Japanese (because you use each number only once per row and column). Based on an 18th-century Swiss game, it was adapted and released as Sudoku by a Japanese publisher in 1984.

■ Lewis Carroll is best known as the author of Alice’s adventures in wonderland, but he was also a gifted mathematician who developed games of logic that combined his analytical and storytelling skills.

■ Mark Twain tried his hand at developing a board game of historical trivia called Mark Twain’s Memory Builder. It didn’t sell anywhere near as well as Adventuresofhuckleberryfinn, but you can visit timeonline.uoregon.edu/twain/index.php to try it.