To my knowledge WKU is the first major American University to offer a class on Chess. The course is offered to honors students and called Chess and Life; taught by Dr. Wieb Van Der Meer. The class has been an overwhelming success and has filled up in less than a minute after being available for registration. As part of the requirements of the course the students must do a poster presentation and express their views on how life imitates the game of chess. The students can choose whatever topic they like. We created this gallery to showcase their excellent work along with others. Enjoy!
Here is a list of some famous physicists who played chess. Perhaps chess helped with their analytical minds and their physics.
1904 Nobel Prize in Physics: John Strutt (1842-1919), or Lord Rayleigh for discovering argon. He was the president of the Essex County Chess Association.
1907 Nobel Prize in Physics: Albert Michelson (1852-1931) for his measurement of the speed of light. He participated in several chess tournaments in California.
1913 Nobel Prize in Physics: Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes (1853-1926) for his work on low temperatures. He was an avid chess player.
1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: William Bragg (1890-1971) for his work in x-rays. He was the secretary of his school’s chess club at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
1918 Nobel Prize in Physics: Max Planck (1858-1947) for his discovery of energy quanta. He played chess with Emanuel Lasker.
1921 Nobel Prize in Physics: Albert Einstein (1879-1955) for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. He told reporters that he played chess as a boy. He always had a chess set and board set up at home on his coffee table. When he settled in Princeton, New Jersey, he played chess with some of the neighbor boys. Einstein wrote a preface to Hannak’s Emanuel Lasker, the Life of a Chess Master. Einstein and Lasker were good friends. There is an alleged chess game of his playing Robert Oppenheimer.
1932 Nobel Prize in Physics: Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen". (1) Heisenberg was probably taught chess by his father. He spent his free time in the evenings playing chess, which he always won. He often held chess matches under his desk at school and could give Queen odds and still win. He would often play blindfold chess with his father while hiking. He was able to reconstruct entire games from memory. After he entered the university in Munich, his obsession with chess became so obvious that Professor Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) finally had to forbid him to play, claiming it was a waste of his time and talents. Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) also told Heisenberg to give up chess and save whatever intellectual effort he could muster for physics. Heisenberg continued to play chess, however. During World War II, Heisenberg was convinced Germany would lose the war. He once said, “Hitler has a chess endgame with one rook less than the others, so he will lose – it will take a year.” According to his wife, Heisenberg saw politics as a “game of chess, in which the feelings and passions of people are subordinated to the charted course of political events, just as the chess figures to the rules of the game.”
1933 Nobel Prize in Physics: Erwin Schroedinger (1887-1961) for his work in quantum mechanics. He once wrote “I do like chess, but it has turned out to be not the appropriate relaxation from the work I am doing.”
1933 Nobel Prize in Physics: Paul Dirac (1902-1984) for "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". (2) Dirac was a chess player, probably taught by his father, who gave him a chess set for Christmas. In his biography, The Strangest Man – The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, by Graham Farmelo, it stated that Dirac worked all day long and took time off only for his Sunday walk and to play chess. He beat most students in the college chess club, sometimes several at the same time. He served for many years as president of the chess club of St. John’s College, Cambridge. With his stepson, he would go over chess problems that they found in newspapers. He played chess with friends such as Peter Kapitza (1894-1984), a Russian physicist, who taught Dirac how to play tennis. When he lectured, he sometime linked subatomic particles to chess. In 1929, Dirac discussed chess problems with Heisenberg on their tour to Japan. After his return to Leipzig, Heisenberg wrote to Dirac: “You are wrong…in the question of mating a King and a Knight with a King and Rook; this is not possible according to the edition of 1926 of Dufresne’s handbook of chess (the best book about theory of chess).”
1938 Nobel Prize in Physics: Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) for demonstrating the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and discovery of nuclear reactions from slow neutrons. (3)
1944 Nobel Prize in Physics: Isidor Rabi (1898-1988) for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. He was an avid chess player.
1946 Nobel Prize in Physics: Percy Bridgman (1882-1961) for his work on the physics of high pressure. He played on the Harvard varsity chess team.
1951 Nobel Prize in Physics: John Cockroft (1897-1967) for splitting the atomic nucleus. He was an avid chess player.
1955 Nobel Prize in Physics: Willis Lamb (1913-2008) for his work on the hydrogen spectrum. He played in several chess tournaments in California.
1965 Nobel Prize in Physics: Julian Schwinger (1918-1994) for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He played chess while in college.
1965 Nobel Prize in Physics: Richard Feynman (1918-1988) "for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". (4) In his lectures, he would compare physics laws with chess analogies. He was a member of his high school chess club.
1973 Nobel Prize in Physics: Ivar Giaever (1929- ) for his work on the tunneling phenomena in solids. He learned chess from his father and used chess to illustrate the science of Nature.
1978 Nobel Prize in Physics: Peter Kapitza (1894-1984) for his work in super fluidity. When he was living in Paris, he used to make a living by playing chess in the small cafes for some wager. He pretended to be a beginner and, in the end, he would usually win.
1979 Nobel Prize in Physics: Abdus Salam (1926-1996) for his work on the electro-weak theory. He played chess in college and spent many hours at the game before being reprimanded by his father for wasting valuable study time.
2000 Nobel Prize in Physics: Zhores Alferov (1930 - ) for developing semiconductor heterostructures. He is an avid chess player and a good friend of Boris Spassky.
2001 Nobel Prize in Physics: Carl Wieman (1951- ) for his work on the Bose-Einstein condensate. He was a strong chess player in his younger years.
Other famous physicists who play(ed) chess:
Leroy Dubeck (1939- ) is a professor of physics at Temple University, with a PhD in Physics from Rutgers. He was USCF president from 1969 to 1972. Advocate for cehss in every school in America to improve critical thinking ability of students.
Michio Kaku (1947- ) states that he played first board on his high school chess team at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto.
Vladimir Malakhov (1980- ), Chess Grandmaster (Super GM) rated 2732, is a nuclear physicist. "I only took the decision to become a professional chess player, though, after I’d graduated at 22, when for the first time in my life I achieved an ELO rating above 2700. Nevertheless, immediately after my studies I took up a job at the Institute of Physics. They did, however, regularly help me out when I wanted to travel to competitions or chess training sessions, with my absences sometimes becoming extended to as much as 2-3 months. My physics suffered as a result, and currently I can only say about myself that I’m an amateur physicist, as it’s a long time since I last worked in the Institute. Would I like to return to physics? A researcher in Dubna earns around 400 euro a month, while a good chess player gets 2-3000 euro, depending on how strongly he plays. I could, it’s true, emigrate to Italy, like my parents (my father currently works in the CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva and is convinced that I could do the same), but I love Dubna, I love Russia and I really don’t intend to move, although life here is by no means cheap. My family spends around 1000 euro a month on basic needs."
Roger Penrose (1931- ) is the brother of honorary GM Jonathan Penrose and is a physicist and chess player.
Edward Teller (1908-2003) was an avid chess player. He learned chess from his father when he was six. He often hiked and played chess with friends without a board. Teller played chess with Heisenberg, but could not beat him at chess. He was able to beat him at table tennis. During lunch breaks or after work, he played chess with other physicists at Lawrence Livermore Labs.
Bibliography:
(1) "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1932". Nobelprize.org. 19 Jan 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1932/
(2) "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933". Nobelprize.org. 19 Jan 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/
(3) "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1938". Nobelprize.org. 19 Jan 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/
(4) "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965". Nobelprize.org. 19 Jan 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/
Mathematicians usually admit that chess is a part of mathematics. Chess is the most mathematical of all strategic games. Mathematics is considered the queen of the sciences (Gauss). Chess is queen of all board games. Both share an abstract way of reasoning in solving problems. Mathematics, like chess, is one of the things where constant practice, constant thinking, and imagining, and studying are necessary to achieve mastery of the subject. Along with music, chess and mathematics are the only fields where there are prodigies. Certain types of mathematical thinking are akin to chess thinking, such as non-verbal (spatial) reasoning, systematic grouping of possibilities, methods of proof, and a high degree of mental flexibility. About one tenth of mathematicians are chess players and one sixth of chess players are mathematicians. Here is a list of some mathematicians that also play(ed) chess or had an interest in chess.
References:
Albers, Alexanderson, Davis, Fascinating Mathematical People: Interviews and Memoirs (2011)
Chang, Academic Genealogy of Mathematicians (2010)
Divinsky, The Chess Encyclopedia (1990)
Fox and James, The Even More Complete Chess Addict (1993)
Golombek, Golombek’s Encyclopedia of Chess (1977)
Hallman, The Chess Artist (2004)
Hooper and Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess (1984 and 1992)
Petkovic, Famous Puzzles of Great Mathematicians (2009)
Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (1976)
Mathematics and Chess Page http://www.permutationpuzzles.org/chess/math_chess.html
Mathematics Genealogy Project http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
George Biddell Airy (1801-1892) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was appointed Lucasian professor of mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He helped establish Greenwich, England as the location of the prime meridian. He was also proficient in chess.
Lionel Kieseritzky (1806-1853) was a mathematics teacher in Dorpat, Livonia (now Tartu, Estonia). He later became a chess professional who gave chess lessons at the Café de la Regence in Paris.
Carl Jaenisch (1813-1872) was a Russian mathematician of the highest order. He dedicated his life to mathematics and chess. In the 1840s, he was among the top players in the world.
Adolf Anderssen (1818-1879) received a mathematics degree from Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) University and was a mathematics instructor at the Friedrichs gymnasium from 1847 to 1879. He was later promoted to Professor in 1865. He is considered to have been the world’s leading chess player in the 1850s to 1860s.
George Salmon (1819-1904) was once considered the best Irish mathematician who taught at the University of Dublin. He was also the best Irish chess player of his day.
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was an English mathematician. For 26 years, he lectured in mathematics at Christ Church. He is famous for his writings, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which was based on a chess game. Dodgson was a passable chess player.
Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) was a Canadian-American mathematician. He became a professor of mathematics and astronomer at the US Naval Observatory and at Johns Hopkins University. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1897 to 1898. He was an expert chess player and often played chess blindfolded.
Thorvald Thiele (1838-1910) was a Danish mathematician, most notable for his work in statistics and the three-body problem. He founded the Danish Mathematical Society in 1873. He was an active member of the first Danish chess club, the Copenhagen Chess Club, founded in 1865.
Jakob Rosanes (1842-1922) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Breslau in 1865, where he taught mathematics for the rest of his life. He was also a chess master and wrote an influential chess book.
Walter William Rouse Ball (1850-1925) was a British mathematician and a mathematics historian. He graduated with a M.A, in mathematics from Cambridge in 1874. He represented Cambridge in early chess matches against Oxford.
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) was a Spanish mathematician and engineer. He worked on solutions to mathematical equations involving physical phenomena that could be modeled by mechanical operations. In 1910 he began to construct a chess automaton he dubbed El Ajedrecista (The Chessplayer). It was the first machine that could play chess and the first true chess computer.
Henri Poincare (1854-1912) was a French mathematician who made fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics. He is considered to be one of the founders of topology. Henri confessed that he was a hopeless chess player.
Otto Titusz Blathy (1860-1939) held a doctorate in mathematics from Budapest and Vienna universities. He became the co-inventor of the modern electric transformer and the single-phase alternating current (AC) electric motor. He was a well known author of chess problems. He once composed a chess problem that was a mate in 292 moves.
Theodor Molien (1861-1941) was a Baltic-German mathematician with a PhD in pure mathematics from Dorpat University. He studied associative algebras and polynomial invariants of finite groups. He was one of the strongest chess players in Dorpat (Tartu), Estonia, and known for his blindfold play.
Harold James Ruthven Murray (1868-1955) graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1890 with a first class degree in Mathematics. He was a chess historian and wrote A History of Chess in 1913.
Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941) received a PhD in mathematics from Erlangen University in 1902. His dissertation was On Series at Convergence Boundaries. His advisor was the famous mathematician, David Hilbert. In 1905, Lasker introduced the notion of a primary ideal (ring theory), and proved the primary decomposition theorem for an ideal of a polynomial ring in terms of primary ideals. This is now known as the Lasker-Noether theorem. He was world chess champion from 1894 to 1921.
Geza Maroczy (1870-1951) was a mathematics professor in a Budapest college. He was a leading Hungarian chess Grandmaster and one of the best players in the world in his time.
Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953) was a German mathematician. He received a PhD from the University of Berlin in 1894. His dissertation was on the calculus of variations. He developed a theorem on chess describing a game by means of a tree structure, which was presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Cambridge in 1912. He rigorously proved that chess and all similar games could be solved.
Bertand Russell (1872-1970) was a famous British mathematician and philosopher. Bertrand gave up competitive chess for mathematics when he was 18. He played chess with his children and wife.
Henry Ernest Atkins (1872-1955) attended Peterhouse, Cambridge as a mathematical scholar. He was mathematical master at Northampton College and at the Wyggeston School. He was a British chess master who won the British Chess Championship nine times.
Edmund Landau (1877-1938) was a German Jewish mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. He received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Berlin in 1899. He published two books on mathematical problems in chess.
Godfrey H. Hardy (1877-1947) was a prominent English theoretical mathematician. In 1903, he earned his M.A. in mathematics, which was the highest academic degree at English universities at that time. He called chess “trivial mathematics.” Hardy enjoyed comparing mathematics to chess puzzles. He called chess problems the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) showed a strong talent in mathematics as a child. He studied mathematics on his own and was several years ahead of any school curriculam in mathematics. In 1900, he was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma and was qualified as a mathematics teacher. He received a PhD in physics in 1905 at the University of Zurich. Einstein played chess as a boy and was a good friend to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker. He played chess with his neighbors and friends and always had a chess board set up at his home.
Harry Bateman (1882-1946) received an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1906. He specialized in the integrals of the Euler-Laplace type dates. His college tutor was W.W. Rouse Ball. He played on the Cambridge chess team and represented Britain in a match against the USA in an intercollegiate team match.
Erwin Voellmy (1886-1951) received a PhD in mathematics from Basel University in 1916. He was a mathematics teacher by profession. He authored several mathematics textbooks and tables of logarithms. He was a three-time Swiss champion.
Richard Reti (1889-1929) studied mathematics at Vienna University, but gave up mathematics for chess. He was one of the top chess players in the world in the 1920s.
Thomas Rayner Dawson (1889-1951) was an amateur mathematician who had several papers published in The Mathematical Gazette. He was a leading British chess problemist and invented many chess fairy pieces such as the grasshopper and nightrider, used in chess problems today. He edited the problem pages of the British Chess Magazine from 1931 to 1951.
Marston Morse (1892-1977) was an American mathematician. He received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard in 1917. He wrote Unending Chess, Symbolic Dynamics and a Problem in Semigroups in 1944. He showed how to circumvent a rule aimd at preventing infinitely protracted chess games by declaring repetition of moves a draw.
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was an American mathematician and regarded as the originator of cybernetics. He was a famous child prodigy. He graduated from High School at age 11 and was awarded a BA in mathematics from Tufts College at the age of 14. He received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard at age 17. His dissertation was on mathematical logic. He was a weak chess player. When asked why he was such a good mathematician but a lousy chess player, Wiener responded, “In chess you’re only as good as your worst move. In mathematics you’re as good as your best move.”
Nikolai Grigoriev (1895-1938) was a Soviet mathematics teacher in Moscow. He won the Moscow chess championship four times. He played in 6 USSR chess championships. He is best known as an endgame analyst.
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (1897-1984) was a mathematics lecture at Cambridge. During World War II he worked at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. His field was combinatorial topology and theoretical computer science. He served as President of the London Mathematical Society in 1949-1951. He was a strong chess player.
Oscar Zariski (1899-1986) was a Russian-born American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He received a PhD from the University of Rome in 1924. His dissertation was on Galois theory. He was an avid chess player.
Luca Pacioli (1445-1517) was an Italian mathematician who contributed to accounting. He taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote an unpublished treatise on the game of chess with 100 chess puzzles. His chess manuscript was rediscovered in 2006. Experts believe da Vinci drew the pieces that illustrated the chess puzzles in Pacioli’s manuscript.
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician and one of the founders of probability theory. He invented the Cardan transmission in mechanics and was the first mathematician to make systematic use of numbers less than zero. He was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. For two years, he abandoned his studies and did nothing but gamble and play chess all day. He invented the method of shading the black squares in chess diagrams. He played chess for 40 years, writing, “I would never be able to express in a few words how much damage, without any compensation, [chess] caused in my domestic life.”
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician who invented the mechanical calculator. He once wrote, “Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.”
Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German mathematician who developed infinitesimal calculus. He created the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He once said that people’s ingenuity is best revealed at chess. He compared algebra and deciphering to the mental finesse involved in chess. He recommended chess and expected good chess players to be good thinkers.
Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754). Abraham was a pioneer in probability theory. He became a chess professional. He published solutions to the Knight’s Tour.
Pierre Raymond de Montmort (1678-1719) was a French mathematician. He wrote a book on probability and was the first to introduce the combinatorial study of derangements. He provided some of the earliest solutions of the knight’s tour.
Leonard Euler (1707-1783) was a Swiss mathematician who made discoveries in calculus and graph theory. He is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century. Euler published the first solutions to the Knight’s Tour. He made the first serious mathematical analysis of the Knight’s Tour in 1758. The knight’s tour is moving the knight through all the squares of a chess board, without ever moving two times to the same square, and beginning with a given square. Euler took up the game of chess but was disappointed with how well he played. He is said to have take up chess lessons, perhaps with Philidor.
Alexandre-Theophile Vandermonde (1735-1796) was a French mathematician who worked on symmetric functions and solution of cyclotomic polynomials. He is the founder of the theory of determinants. He had an interest in solving the Knight’s tour and published a paper on it.
George Atwood (1745-1807) was a distinguished English mathematician who graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote a textbook on Newtonian mechanics describing impact and simple harmonic motion. He was also a renowned chess player of the 18th century and recorded many of the chess games by Francois Philidor and other chess players in London.
Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833) was a French mathematician. He was author of a geometry book which was the leading text book on the topic for around 100 years. He had an interest in the Knight’s Tour and found a solution in which the first and the last squares are a single move apart, called closed or reentrant.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) was a child prodigy and German mathematician, sometimes called the greatest mathematician since antiquity. He spent his spare time playing chess. In 1850, he published a solution to how many queens can be placed on a chess board to guard all the squares except the occupied ones. The problem was first proposed in 1848 by Max Bezzel. The maximum number is 8 queens with 12 basic positions and 92 solutions after rotation and reflection.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was an English mathematician who originated the concept of a programmable computer. In his autobiography, he noted that he played chess at Cambridge very frequently with several other good players. He published a paper entitled “An Account of Euler’s Method of Solving a Problem relating to the Knight’s move at Chess.”
Ludwig Bledow (1795-1846). Dr. Bledow had a PhD in mathematics and was a professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gymnasium. He was founder of the German Chess Association and founded the first German chess magazine. He was the strongest Berlin chess player around 1840.
Francois Le Lionnais (1901-1984) was a French mathematician. He was the author of Great Currents of Mathematical Thought. He was an amateur chess player and an author of a chess book and editor of a French chess magazine. He played chess with Marcel Duchamp.
Max Euwe (1901-1981). Dr. Euwe received a PhD in mathematics from Amsterdam University in 1926. Euwe then lectured on mathematics in Winterswyk and Rotterdam and was appointed to the Lyceum for Girls in Amsterdam, teaching mathematics there from 1926 to 1940. He was a former world chess champion from 1935 to 1937.
John Riordan (1902-1988) was an American mathematician who specialized in combinatorial analysis. He noticed that there were a number of problems involving permutations in combinatorial analysis that can be connected with a rook problem on the chess board. He called them rook polynomials.
John von Neumann (1903-1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. John classified chess as a two-player zero-sum game and proved the minimax theorem in 1928.
Arpad Elo (1903-1992) was a professor of mathematics and physics at Marquette University who created a mathematical rating system for two player games (chess) called the ELO system. He was a chess master and won the Wisconsin championship 9 times.
Vladimir Makogonov (1904-1993) was a mathematics teacher by profession in Azerbaijan. He won the Azerbaijan championship 5 times and played in 8 USSR chess championships. He was awarded the International Master title in 1950 and an honorary Grandmaster title in 1987.
Alexander Gelfond (1906-1968) received a PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1935. He taught mathematics there for many years. During World War II, he was the Chief Cryptographer of the Soviet Navy. He was an expert in chess.
James W.L. Glaisher (1848-1928) was a prolific English mathematician. He taught at Cambridge and specialized in number theory. He published a proof on the 8 queens problem in 1874 as to the total number of possible different solutions (12 patterns, 92 solutions).
Kurt Hirsch (1906-1986) was a German mathematician. He received a PhD from the University of Berlin in 1930. His dissertation was on the philosophy of mathematics. He completed a second doctorate at Cambridge in 1937 on polycyclic groups. His dissertation was on A Class of Infinite Soluble Groups. In 1945-46, he was Leicester County Chess Champion.
Harold McCarter Taylor (1907-1995) was a New Zealand-born British mathematician. He received his PhD in mathematics from Cambridge in 1933. He was an avid chess player.
Louis Statham (1907-1983) had a PhD in mathematics and pioneered the use of shock waves in oil exploration, which made him a multi-millionaire. He was a correspondence chess player and chess philanthropist who organized the famous Lone Pine tournaments from 1971 through 1981.
Maurice Kendall (1907-1983) was a British statistician who produced one of the largest collections of random digits (100,000 digits). He specialized in random number generation. His interest outside mathematics was chess and he played chess blindfolded against Jacob Bronowski while at Cambridge.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician. He received a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. During World War II, he developed mathematical approaches to bombing strategy for the RAF Bomber Command. He was a strong chess player at Cambirdge. He represented Cambridge University on board three against Oxford University in 1931. He won the Hull Chess Club championship, the county championship, and the Yorkshire championship in his early days.
Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander (1909-1974) won a scholarship to study mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge. He specialized in prime number theory for his post-graduate work. From 1932 to 1938, he taught mathematics in Winchester, England. During World War II, he became a leading British cryptanalyst. He won the British Chess Championship twice (1938 and 1956). He represented England in the Chess Olympiad six times. He was awarded the International Master title in 1950 and the International Master for Correspondence Chess in 1970.
Max Black (1909-1988) received a PhD in mathematics from the University of London. His dissertation was Theories of logical positivism. He was a former chess champion at Cambridge University. He played chess his entire life.
Norman Steenrod (1910-1971) was an American mathematician specializing in algebraic topology. He received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1936. His dissertation was Universal homology groups. He was an avid chess player who played against faculty and students at Princeton.
Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984) was a renowned Polish-Jewish mathematician. He received a PhD in mathematics from Lwow Polytechnic Institute in 1933. He invented the Monte Carlo method of computation. In his autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician, he mentioned that when he first came to the United States, he played chess with other mathematicians for relaxation. He once said, “In many cases, mathematics as well as chess, is an escape from reality.”
George Lorentz (1910-2006) graduated with a degree in mathematics from Leningrad State University. He received a PhD at Tubingen, Germany in 1944. He later moved to the USA where he taught mathematics at Wayne State University, Syracuse University, and the University of Texas. He was an avid chess player.
Gedeon Barcza (1911-1986). Dr. Barcza had a PhD in mathematics and was a Hungarian professor of mathematics. He was eight-time Hungarian champion and represented Hungary in six Chess Olympiads.
David G. Champernowne (1912-2000) was an English mathematician. He was Professor of Statistical Economics at Oxford (1848-1959) and professor of Economics and Statistics at Cambridge (1970-2000). In 1948, he helped develop one of the first chess-playing computer programs, called TURBOCHAMP (which beat Champernowne’s wife in its only victory).
Alan Turing (1912-1954) received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1938. His dissertation was on the notion of relative computing. He was a famous computer scientist and an amateur chess player who wrote one of the earliest chess programs for computers. He was a very poor chess player. Britsh International Master Harry Golombek could give him queen-odds and still beat him.
Shaun Wylie (1913-2009) was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker. He received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton, specializing in topology. He was an accomplished chess player and coached a high school chess team that was able to beat college and university team in England.
Paul Erdos (1913-1996) was a Hungarian mathematician who published more papers, about1,500, than any other mathematican in history. In 1934, at the age of 21, he was awarded a doctorate in mathematics. He was a skillful player of chess. He was one of the greatest mathematicians but was frequently stumped by simple chess problems. He would have to show chess problems to his friends and they solved it for him.
Lev Loshinsky (1913-1976) was a Soviet college lecturer in mathematics at Moscow State University. He was considered one of the greatest of all chess composers. He was an International Grandmaster in Chess Composition.
At this point there are so many mathematicians who play chess that the website won't let us post all the characters! We would like to make special recognition of one last person:
Barbara Huberman Liskov (1939- ) earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968, she received a PhD from Stanford in computer science. The topic of her PhD dissertation was a computer program to play chess endgames. She was the first woman in the world to receive a doctorate from a computer science department.
"Life is a chess match. Victory belongs to those who can visualize the future. Some play the game one move at a time, some two, and then there are the gifted few who can see eight or more moves into the game. Truly in Mother Nature you have an opponent far stronger than any grandmaster. She has an infinite number of moves at her disposal, while you play with only a handful. Nonetheless, it is not the number of moves, but the sequence in which you play them that decides the outcome. How many of us can look ten years from now into our own lives? How many can see the final moment? Before Michelangelo sculpted his David, David existed in his head. Before you can live a meaningful life, it must already exist... in your mind. "
--- Yashkirat Singh, Collection of Thoughts: On Life.
The Role of Chess in Academics and Higher Order Thinking
Samuel J Hunt, M.S. Exercise Science
Western Kentucky University
This is a cursory summation of a small portion of the mountain of evidence available for review of the effect chess has had on scholastic performance and its influence in cognitive psychological research (1). In order to begin understanding the impact of chess, there is one apical principle that needs to be clearly understood when summarizing the effects chess produces and that is this: when the brain receives new information into long-term memory, new neural nets are formed, the brain is physiologically changed, and learning is expanded (2). Chess is a medium of pure information that thrusts the explorer into an unadulterated, intrinsically self-motivated, quest for discovery, perfection, and resolution. To put the mind enhancing effects of chess in perspective, in other quests of learning, such as the evolution of new motor skills through the developmental stages of childhood, the central nervous system sends impulses through the parallel fibers within the cerebellum at a rate of up to 500 spikes per second (3). Yet, during a single chess game, an immense number of possibilities, 2x10 raised to 143 power (4), can be poured over to stimulate accelerated, explosive growth of new neural networks. It goes without saying that increased neural nets lead to increased cognitive function, performance, and in the case of brain injury, disease or stroke, alternate pathways in order to maintain function.
Because of the perceived effect chess has on mental ability, scientists doing cognitive research have been studying the effects chess has on cognitive and psychological performance since the late 1800’s in areas such as perception (5), memory (6,7,8), thinking ability (9,10), visual imagination (11,12), and brain activation (13,14,15,16). In addition, because chess has been shown to stimulate the right brain (17) for it's creative solutions, and the left brain to derive the logical steps to implement the solution; the practice of chess models genius. Some of the greatest thinkers of all time, like Einstein, were right brain thinkers who learned to play chess at a very early age and continued to play throughout life.
Chess has been shown to have significant effects on children’s scholastic performance (18, 19, 20, 21) and IQ (22, 23). Chess enables the practice of Heuristics (24) through orientation, exploration, investigation, and proof; which parallel Kentucky'’s own state standards for education. So much improvement has been observed in scholastic performance that Idaho will be a pioneer for using chess statewide in the classroom for all of its 2nd and 3rd grade students (25) to help advance math, science, and literacy. Finally, chess also improves the mental health of its participants (26). Evidently, the more you play chess throughout your life, the more likely you are to forego the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms.
There is much more that I am leaving unsaid about the positive effects that are observed on social, emotional, confidence, camaraderie, and sportsmanship levels that are instilled in the players of chess. Even though there is far more research that needs to be conducted to better understand what the mechanisms are that become innervated in the brain during chess play, the effects are nonetheless observed, powerful, lasting and transferrable (27, 28, 29) to other domains making the academic pursuit of chess the overlooked bastion for improved intellectual advancement at every level in every discipline.
1. Charness, N. (1992). The impact of chess research on cognitive science. Psychological Research, 54, 4-9.
2. White, W. (1996). What every teacher should know about the functions of learning in the human brain. Education, 117(2) 290-296.
3. Thatch, W. (1998). What is the role of the cerebellum in motor learning and cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2(9) 331-337.
4. De Groot, A., & Gobet, F., Jongman, R. (1996). Perception and memory in chess. Assen, Holland : Van Gorcum.
5. Chase, W.G. & Simon, H.A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55-81
6. Charness, N. (1976). Memory for chess positions: Resistance to interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2(6) 641-53.
7. Chase, W.G. & Simon, H.A. (1973). The minds eye in chess.
8. Gobet, F., & Simon, H.A. (1996). Templates in chess memory: a mechanism for recalling several boards. Cognitive Psychology 31(1) 1-40.
9. Gobet F. (1998). Chess players’ thinking revisited. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 57 18-32.
10. Saariluoma, P. (2001). Chess and content-oriented psychology of thinking. Psicologica, 22 143-164.
11. Campitelli, G., & Gobet, F. (2005). The mind’s eye in blindfold chess. European Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(1) 23-45.
12. Saariluoma, P., & Kalakowski, V. (1997). Skilled imagery and long-term working memory. American Journal of Psychology, 110(2) 177-201
13. Nichelli, P., Grafman, J., Pietrini, P., Always, D., Carton, J., Miletich, R. (1994). Brain activity in chess playing. Nature 369 191.
14. Amidzic, O., Riehle, H., Fehr, T., Wienbruch, C., Elbert, T. (2001). Pattern of focal gamma-bursts in chess players. Nature 412 603.
15. Atherton, M., Zhuang, J., Bart, W., Hu, X., He, S. (2003). A functional MRI study of high-level cognition. I. The game of chess. Cognitive Brain Research, 16 26-31.
16. Onofrj, M., Curatola, L., Valentini, G., Antonelli, M., Thomas, A., Fulgente, T. (1995). Non-dominant dorsal-prefrontal activation during chess problem solution evidenced by single photon emission computerized tomography. Neuroscience letters, 198(3) 169-172.
17. Chabris, C., & Hamilton, S. (1992). Hemispheric specialization for skilled perceptual organization by chessmasters. Neuropsychologia 30(1) 47-57.
18. Hong, S., & Bart, W.M. (2007). Cognitive effects of chess instruction on students at risk for academic failure. International Journal of Special Education, 22(3), 89-96.
19. Frank, A., & D’Hondt, W. (1979). Aptitudes and learning chess in Zaire. Psychopathologie Africane, 15, 81-98.
20. Horgan, D., & Morgan, D. (1990). Chess expertise in children. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 4 109-128.
21. Margulies, S. (1996). The effects of chess on reading scores. New York: Chess-in-the-schools.
22. Frydman, M., & Lymm, R., (1992). The general intelligence and spatial abilities of gifted young Belgian chess players. British journal of Psychology, 83(pt 2) 233-5.
23. Gobet, F., & Campitelli, G. (2002). In J. Retschitzk: R. Handed-Zubel, (Eds.). Step by Step. Proceedings of the 4th Colloquim “Board Games in Academia”, pp.103-112. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires. http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2274.
24. Root, A. (2006). Children and chess: A guide for educators. Westport, Conneticut: Libraries Unlimited.
25. McClain, D., (2008). Idaho turns to chess as education strategy. The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/us/20chess.html.
26. Coyle, J. (2003). Use it or lose it--do effortful mental activities protect against dementia? New England Journal of Medicine, 348(25) 2489-90
27. Ericsson, K., & Staszewski, J. (1989). Skilled memory and expertise: mechanisms of exceptional importance. Retrieved Sept. 28, 2009:
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA193829&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
28. Ericsson, K., & Kinitsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102(2) 211-245.
29. Gobet, F., & Simon, H. (1996). The roles of recognition processes and look-ahead search in time-constrained expert problem solving: Evidence from grandmaster-level chess. Psychological Science, 7(1) 52-55.
Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common types of dementia which affects approximately 18 million people and their families worldwide (Summit AD). It is a degenerative brain disease that attacks the body’s neurons, or brain nerve cells, resulting in difficulty thinking, loss of memory, and distinctive behavioral changes. Although Alzheimer’s disease is not a normal part of biological aging, the risk of developing the illness rises with advancing age. Half of all individuals 85 and older will exhibit many of the symptoms throughout their life with an estimated 5.1 million Americans suffering from this debilitating disease. Additionally, current research from the National Institute on Aging indicates that the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease for an individual doubles every five years beyond age 65. Furthermore, as the baby boomer cohort reaches old age, the number of people age 65 and older is estimated to more than double between 2010 and 2050 to 88.5 million people which accounts for more than 20 percent of the total population. Lastly, it is estimated that one to four family members must act as a caregiver for each individual afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease (AFA).
With the aforementioned facts in mind, it is not surprising that medical researchers and gerontologists have been trying to find various ways to combat this debilitating illness. However, currently no cure has been found to stop the spread of Alzheimer’s (Quadagno 159). Scientists have therefore focused much of their energy on methods to alleviate the symptoms and to develop experimental treatments to stop the advance of the disease in patients already tormented with Alzheimer’s. It is through this search for treatment that the game of chess has been seen as a potential solution to retard the deterioration of the brain in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Chess is an immortal game played by both the young and old. One of the most interesting aspects of chess which easily distinguishes it from the other endearing games of times past is the fact that no matter how many times one plays chess, he or she will never play exactly the same game again. This quality of chess causes it to be more than just a game but a specific discipline where strategy goes hand in hand with experience. Because chess has such a universal element to its composition, it is no surprise that people from every walk of life imaginable can learn, play, and be affected by the many life lessons gleaned from the eternal chessboard. Seeing as how Alzheimer’s is such a pervasive problem among the elderly and in light of the fact that older individuals are more inclined to play chess over other games, researchers have thus looked to chess to aid in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.
