For millions of casual newspaper readers who rack their brains over Sudoku puzzles each morning, it’s simply a puzzle that provides a few minutes of mental exercise. For Harvard University graduate student Thomas Snyder, it earned him the title “world champion.”
Snyder joined competitors from 32 countries at the World Championship for Sudoku last month in Prague, Czech Republic, winning the individual title after going head-to-head with Japan’s Yuhei Kusui.
“They often feature unique puzzles that could never exist in other venues,” he said. “Seeing such impressive constructions is always a memorable part of the events.”
Snyder’s online-puzzle infatuation began in 2004 when completing the puzzles on paper stopped challenging him. Snyder has since taken the U.S. Sudoku Qualifying Test and made an appearance at the first world championship last year in Italy before winning it all this year.
Snyder said he has little trouble solving puzzles, but he avoids the larger ones because he worries he will spend too much time on them.
“Making an error and being stuck for hours — that does not seem like fun to me, so I skip the 25-by-25 sudoku out there,” he said.
Friend and coworker Mary Rozenman said Snyder’s “puzzling prowess” is only one sign of his quick mind.
“From our first interaction, it was clear that Thomas was a little bit quirky,” she said. “He speaks very, very quickly – [he] has an incredibly keen intellect.”
Rozenman, who works with Snyder as a chemist, added she expects he will accomplish much more in the field of science.
“He has told me many times that he sometimes enjoys writing puzzles even more than he enjoys solving them,” she said. “I think that’s the educator in him.”
Despite Snyder having the world championship title under his belt, Harvard has had a lackluster reaction to Snyder’s victory, according to Rozenman, who attributed this to the difficulty gaining recognition at a campus where everyone is best in the world at something.
For now, Snyder said he plans to collaborate with teammate Wei-Hwa Huang to start an online forum for math- and logic-puzzle construction for the United States, and he will model it after a system already used by the Japanese puzzle-development company Nikoli, which coined the word “sudoku.”
“We’d like to create the equivalent of Nikoli for the U.S. market,” Huang said in an email.
Despite the weight of his accomplishment in the eyes of sudoku enthusiasts, Snyder said he is not using it for self-promotion.
“I’d never use it as my pick-up line, at least on a first meeting, as I think the stereotypical view of a ‘sudoku-ist’ is one of being a nerd,” he said. “Still, when people get to know me, they will realize how special my talents are.”
“It’s always tricky to bring up the sudoku thing since it sort of screams, ”This guy is frighteningly clever,’ and people aren’t sure how to respond,” Rozenman said. Still, Rozenman said Snyder’s accomplishments deserve recognition.