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I teach college-level mathematics to engineers. Even these preselected nerds are not very practiced at analytical thinking. Sudoku is all about that, and has a hige range of difficulty. As has been pointed out, it is math (logic) but is not arithmetic. They have my daughter doing it in school as part of math (bravo school system). The hardest ones are a real struggle and require complicated logic. What is most interesting to me about it is that many people who "can't do math" can do quite complicated Sudoku puzzles because nobody told them it is math! So having so many Americans of all ages suddenly doing something analytic cannot be a bad thing. As for crosswords, they are cool too. Anything that gets the brain moving that is also popular has to be a good thing. Would you rather all were reading People Magazine?
