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Euwe vs Lasker, 1920
Max Euwe, 1963

Euwe vs Lasker, 1920

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Euwe vs Lasker, 1920
An exhibition game


By D Joyner and G Goodson

Did you know that both of these remarkable chess players started their career as mathematicians?


Max Euwe (1901-05-20 to 1981-11-26) was born in the Watergraafsmeer, in Amsterdam, the son of a teacher. (His name is pronounced “uh-rv-eh”.) His mother was a passionate  chess player, who organized weekly chess nights with her friends. In 1920, where 19-year old Max was a chess master, he played World Champion Emanuel Lasker in an exhibition match. (Lasker traveled to Holland in February 1920 for some simultaneous chess displays. Max played Lasker at least twice that month in these exhibitions.)
Euwe studied mathematics  at the University of Amsterdam under the founder of intuitionistic logic, L.E.J. Brouwer (who later became his friend and for whom he held a funeral oration). However, the advisor for Euwe’s PhD (earned in 1926, at the age of 25) was Roland Weitzenböck. Euwe taught mathematics, first in Rotterdam, and later at a girls' Lyceum in Amsterdam. A few years after getting his PhD, he published an interesting mathematical analysis of the game of chess from an intuitionistic point of view, in which he showed, using the Thue–Morse sequence (a substitution sequence that sends 0 to 01 and 1 to 10, continuing indefinitely), that the then-official rules (in 1929) did not exclude the possibility of infinite games [1].
Euwe continued to improve in chess while getting his PhD. Indeed, he was the fifth player to become World Chess Champion, a title he held from 1935 until 1937.
After World War II, Euwe started research in the young field of informatics which at that time was regarded as a branch of mathematics. 
In 1957, Euwe played a short match against 14-year-old future world champion Bobby Fischer, winning one game and drawing the other.   
In 1959, he was appointed director of the Dutch research center for automatic data processing.  In 1964, he was appointed  professor of informatics at the university of Rotterdam and, later, at Tilburg. He retired from Tilburg University in 1971.
He served as President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 1970 to 1978. During his lifetime, Euwe wrote over 70 chess books, far more than any other World Champion; some of the best-known are The Road to Chess Mastery, Judgement and Planning in Chess, The Logical Approach to Chess, and Strategy and Tactics in Chess.

[1] M. Euwe, "Mengentheoretische Betrachtungen über das Schachspiel". Proc. Konin. Akad. Wetenschappen. Vol. 32, no. 5 (1929) 633–642. An English translation has appeared here:
M. Euwe, “Mathematics - Set-Theoretic Considerations on the Game of Chess, translation of Euwe (1929),” New Mathematics and Natural Computation, vol. 12, no.1 (2016) 11-20.

(This mini-bio was collected from Wikipedia, the website of Boergens , and Alexandr Munninghoff’s biography, Max Euwe: The Biography, New In Chess, 2007.)

Emanuel Lasker (1868-12-24 to 1941-01-11), born in what is now Barlinek in Poland, the son of a Jewish cantor. (Pronounced “lask-ah”, and not to be confused with Edward Lasker, an IM and a distant cousin.) He was World Chess Champion for 27 years, from 1894 to 1921, the longest reign of any officially recognised World Chess Champion in history. 
He studied mathematics and philosophy at the universities in Berlin, Göttingen (where David Hilbert - regarded as the greatest mathematician in the world at the time - was one of his doctoral advisors), Heidelberg and Erlangen. In 1895 he published two mathematical articles in Nature. On the advice of Hilbert, he registered for doctoral studies at Erlangen during 1900–1902. In 1901 he presented his doctoral thesis [1] at Erlangen (very unusual for a thesis to be written in such a short time), and in the same year it was published by the Royal Society. He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics in 1902. His most significant mathematical article, in 1905, published a theorem of which Emmy Noether developed a more generalized form, which is now regarded as of fundamental importance to modern  algebra and algebraic geometry. Lasker held short-term positions as a mathematics lecturer at Tulane University in New Orleans (1893) and Victoria University in Manchester (1901).


[1] E. Lasker,  “Über Reihen auf der Convergenzgrenze” (English: "On Series at Convergence Boundaries"), PhD thesis, Erlangen Univ., 1901.

(This mini-bio was collected from Wikipedia.)


The following game was played in an exhibition in Holland and the moves were publishes in a local newspaper.


[Event "Simul, 25b"]
[Site "Amsterdam NED"]
[Date "1920.02.09"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Max Euwe"]
[Black "Emanuel Lasker"]
[ECO "E12"]


1. d4 Nf6 
2. Nf3 e6 
3. c4 b6 

This is the Queen's Indian defense, Kasparov variation

4. Bg5 h6 
5. Bh4 Bb7 
6. Nc3 d5 

Modern analysis says the developing move 6 ... Bb4 is better.

7. e3 Nbd7 
8. cxd5 exd5 
9. Qa4 a6 

Better than Qa4 is 9. Ne5, which is played next:

10. Ne5 Bd6 

This move ... Bd6 is a mistake, losing a pawn. Better is 10 ... b5, kicking the queen.

11. f4 c5 

Better than 11 f4 is 11 Bxf6 gxf6 12 Nc6, winning the d5 pawn. 

12. Bd3 b5 
13. Qd1 Qb6 
14. Bf5 cxd4 
15. exd4 g5



Better than 15 ... g5, which loses a pawn (and the game), is 15 ... Bc8. Black's motivation might be to clear the way for the black queen to check on e3,  as in the game. As we will see, white can neutralize that attack.

16. fxg5 Nxe5 

This move ... Nxe5 leads to the loss of a piece, but it does give black a small attack.

17. dxe5 Qe3+ 
18. Qe2 Qxe2+ 
19. Kxe2 hxg5 
20. Bg3! d4 

This move 20 Bg3 squashes black's attack. 

21. exf6 Bxg2 
22. Rhe1 Bxg3 
23. hxg3 Rh2 
24. Kd3+ Kf8 
25. Ne4 Rd8
26. Nxg5 Bd5 
27. b3 Rg2 
28. Rg1 Rf2 
29. g4 b4 
30. Rh1 Bxh1
31. Rxh1 Kg8 
32. Rh7 1-0

Lasker resigns here.

Of the over 400 simultaneous games that Lasker played while in Holland in 1920, he only lost 9% of them. In this exhibition game, the young master Max Euwe beats the then current World Chess champion, Emanuel Lasker.

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Mathematicians who play(ed) chess

This post is copied from my earlier post here.

 

  • Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander (1909-1974), late British chess champion. Alexander may not have had a PhD in mathematics but taught mathematics and he did mathematical work during WWII (code and cryptography), as did the famous Soviet chess player David Bronstein (see the book Kahn, Kahn on codes). He was the strongest English player after WWII, until Jonathan Penrose appeared.
  • Adolf Anderssen (1818-1879). Pre World Championships but is regarded as the strongest player in the world between 1859 and 1866. He received a degree (probably not a PhD) in mathematics from Breslau University and taught mathematics at the Friedrichs gymnasium from 1847 to 1879. He was promoted to Professor in 1865 and was given an honorary doctorate by Breslau (for his accomplishments in chess) in 1865.
  • Magdy Amin Assem (195?-1996) specialized in p-adic representation theory and harmonic analysis on p-adic reductive groups. He published several important papers before a ruptured aneurysm tragically took his life. He was IM strength (rated 2379) in 1996.
  • Gedeon Barcza (1911-1986), pronounced bartsa, was a Hungarian professor of mathematics and a chess grandmaster. The opening 1.Nf3 d5 2.g3 is called the Barcza System. The opening 1.e4 e6 2.d4 c5 is known as the Barcza-Larsen Defense.
  • Ludwig Erdmann Bledow (1795-1846) was a German professor of mathematics (PhD). He founded the first German chess association, Berliner Schachgesellschaft, in 1827. He was the first person to suggest an international chess tournament (in a letter to von der Lasa in 1843). His chess rating is not known but he did at one point win a match against Adolf Anderssen.
  • Robert Coveyou (1915 – 1996) completed an M.S. degree in Mathematics, and joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a research mathematician. He became a recognized expert in pseudo-random number generators. He is known for the quotation “The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance,” which is based on a title of a paper he wrote. An excellent tournament chess player, he was Tennessee State Champion eight times.
  • Nathan Divinsky (1925-2012) earned a PhD in Mathematics in 1950 from the University of Chicago and was a mathematics professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He tied for first place in the 1959 Manitoba Open.
  • Noam Elkies (1966-), a Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University specializing in number theory, is a study composer and problem solver (ex-world champion). Prof. Elkies, at age 26, became the youngest scholar ever to have attained a tenured professorship at Harvard. One of his endgame studies is mentioned, for example, in the book Technique for the tournament player, by GM Yusupov and IM Dvoretsky, Henry Holt, 1995. He wrote 11 very interesting columns on Endgame Exporations (posted by permission).
    Some other retrograde chess constructions of his may be found at the interesting Dead Reckoning web site of Andrew Buchanan.
    See also Professor Elkies’s very interesting Chess and Mathematics Seminar pages.
  • Thomas Ernst earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala Univ. in 2002 and does research in algebraic combinatorics with applications to mathematical physics. His chess rating is about 2400 (FIDE).
  • Machgielis (Max) Euwe (1901-1981), World Chess Champion from 1935-1937, President of FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Echecs) from 1970 to 1978, and arbitrator over the turbulent Fischer – Spassky World Championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972. I don’t know as many details of his mathematical career as I’d like. One source gives: PhD (or actually its Dutch equivalent) in Mathematics from Amsterdam University in 1926. Another gives: Doctorate in philosophy in 1923 and taught as a career. Published a paper on the mathematics of chess “Mengentheoretische Betrachtungen uber das Schachspiel”.
  • Ed Formanek (194?-), International Master. Ph.D. Rice University 1970. Retired from the mathematics faculty at Penn State Univ. Worked primarily in matrix theory and representation theory.
  • Stephen L. Jones is an attorney in LA, but when younger, taught math in the UMass system and spent a term as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ. He is one rung below the level of International Master at over the board chess; in correspondence chess, he has earned two of the three norms needed to become a Grandmaster.
  • Charles Kalme (1939-2002), earned his master title in chess at 15, was US Junior champ in 1954, 1955, US Intercollegiate champ in 1957, and drew in his game against Bobby Fischer in the 1960 US championship. In 1960, he also was selected to be on the First Team All-Ivy Men’s Soccer team, as well as the US Student Olympiad chess team. (Incidently, it is reported that this team, which included William Lombary on board one, did so well against the Soviets in their match that Boris Spassky, board one on the Soviet team, was denied forieng travel for two years as punishment.) In 1961 graduated 1st in his class at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, The University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. He also received the Cane award (a leadership award) that year. After getting his PhD from NYU (advisor Lipman Bers) in 1967 he to UC Berkeley for 2 years then to USC for 4-5 years. He published 2 papers in mathematics in this period, “A note on the connectivity of components of Kleinian groups”, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 137 1969 301–307, and “Remarks on a paper by Lipman Bers”, Ann. of Math. (2) 91 1970 601–606. He also translated Siegel and Moser, Lectures on celestial mechanics, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1971, from the German original. He was important in the early stages of computer chess programming. In fact, his picture and annotations of a game were featured in the article “An advice-taking chess computer” which appeared in the June 1973 issue of Scientific American. He was an associate editor at Math Reviews from 1975-1977 and then worked in the computer industry. Later in his life he worked on trying to bring computers to elementary schools in his native Latvia A National Strategy for Bringing Computer Literacy to Latvian Schools. His highest chess rating was acheived later in his life during a “chess comeback”: 2458.
  • Miroslav Katetov (1918 -1995) earned his PhD from Charles Univ in 1939. Katetov was IM chess player (earned in 1951) and published about 70 research papers, mostly from topology and functional analysis.
  • Martin Kreuzer (1962-), CC Grandmaster, is rated over 2600 in correspondence chess (ICCF, as of Jan 2000). His OTB rating is over 2300. His specialty is computational commutative algebra and applications. Here is a recent game of his:
    Kreuzer, M – Stickler, A
  • Emanuel Lasker (1868-1941), World Chess Champion from 1894-1921, PhD (or more precisely its German equivalent) in Mathematics from Erlangen Univ in 1902. Author of the influential paper “Zur theorie der moduln und ideale,” Math. Ann. 60(1905)20-116, where the well-known Lasker-Noether Primary Ideal Decomposition Theorem in Commutative Algebra was proven (it can be downloaded for free here). Lasker wrote and published numerous books and papers on mathematics, chess (and other games), and philosophy.
  • Vania Mascioni, former IECG Chairperson (IECG is the Internet Email Chess Group), is rated 2326 by IECG (as of 4-99). His area is Functional Analysis and Operator Theory.
  • A. Jonathan Mestel, grandmaster in over-the-board play and in chess problem solving, is an applied mathematician specializing in fluid mechanics and is the author of numerous research papers. He is on the mathematics faculty of the Imperial College in London.
  • Walter D. Morris (196?-), International Master. Currently on the mathematics faculty at George Mason Univ in Virginia.
  • Karsten Müller earned the Grandmaster title in 1998 and a PhD in mathematics in 2002 at the University of Hamburg.
  • John Nunn (1955-), Chess Grandmaster, D. Phil. (from Oxford Univ.) in 1978 at the age of 23. His PhD thesis is in algebraic topology. Nunn is also a GM chess problem solver.
  • Hans-Peter Rehm (1942-), earned his PhD in Mathematics from Karlsruhe Univ. (1970) then taught there for many years. He is a grandmaster of chess composition. He has written several papers in mathematics, such as “Prime factorization of integral Cayley octaves”, Ann. Fac. Sci. Toulouse Math (1993), but most in differential algebra, his specialty. A collection of his problems has been published as: Hans+Peter+Rehm=Schach Ausgewählte Schachkompositionen & Aufsätze (= selected chess problems and articles), Aachen 1994.
  • Kenneth W. Regan, Professor of Computer Science at the State Univ. of New York Buffalo, is currently rated 2453. His research is in computational complexity, a field of computer science which has a significant mathematical component.
  • Jakob Rosanes obtained his mathematics doctorate from the Univ. of Breslau in 1865 where he taught for the rest of his life. In the 1860s he played a match against A. Anderssen which ended with 3 wins, 3 losses, and 1 draw.
  • Jan Rusinek (1950-) obtained his mathematics PhD in 1978 and earned a Grandmaster of Chess Composition in 1992.
  • Jon Speelman (1956-) is an English Grandmaster chess player and chess writer. He earned his PhD in mathematics from Oxford.