Blogs
Mestel-Nunn, 1982
Jon Mestel v Yasser Seirawan John Nunn 60th Birthday Blitz Chess Tournament, Home House, Portland Square, London, 25 April 2015. Nunn is in bg in striped shirt.

Mestel-Nunn, 1982

Avatar of davidjoyner
davidjoyner
| 0

Mestel vs Nunn, 1982

This post was co-written with Geoff Goodson.

We covered some of John Nunn’s biography in an earlier post. As mentioned, he has a PhD in mathematics. Here are a few more details of his mathematical background. His 1978 thesis, entitled “Some problems in algebraic topology,” supervised by John Hubbuck, resulted in the publication:
J.D.M. Nunn, “The homotopy types of finite H-spaces,” Topology 18 (1979), no. 1, 17–28. In 1981, Nunn left Oxford University to pursue chess professionally. In addition to Nunn’s solution to problems in topology, he is also involved with the composition of chess problems. He won the World Chess Solving Championship in 2004, where he earned his final GM norm in problem solving. He won the World Solving Championship again in 2007 and in 2010.

More recently, in 2022 at age 67, Nunn won the World 65+ Senior Chess Championship in Assisi, Italy. 

Andrew Jonathan Mestel (1957-03-13 to present) in Cambridge, England) is Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College London, working in magnetohydrodynamics and biological fluid dynamics. He obtained his PhD in 1982 with the thesis "Magnetic Levitation of Liquid Metals" at University of Cambridge. His university web page lists numerous research publications (many available for download as a pdf), several as recent as 2022.
A distinguished chess player, he was the first person to be awarded chess Grandmaster titles by FIDE in both over-the-board play and problem solving. He has also represented England at contract bridge.
Mestel was awarded the Grandmaster (GM) title in 1982 and became a Chess Solving Grandmaster and the World Chess Solving Champion in 1997. With John Nunn, he is a medal-winning member of the British Chess Solving Team. (Above photo is by John Saunders, https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnchess2/).

From the 1950s to the 1990s, FIDE organized a series of tournaments to select candidates for the world chess championship. The world was divided into distinct zones. First, each FIDE member nation would hold a national championship, with the top players qualifying for the Zonal tournament.  The top players in each Zonal tournament would meet in the Interzonal tournament. Those top players would move on to the Candidates tournament. (Since 2005, the zonal and interzonal tournament system has gone away. The As of 2022, to qualify for the Candidates tournament, there are several options described here.)

The following 1982 game was played in Leiden, as part of a zonal playoff.

Nunn was black and Mestel was white and they played the Najdorf variation B92 of the Sicilian defense.

  1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Nf6 4. Nc3 cxd4 5. Nxd4 a6 6. Be2 e5 7. Nb3 Be7 8. a4 O-O 9. O-O Be6 10. f4 exf4 11. Bxf4 Nc6 12. Kh1 d5 13. e5 Nd7 14. Nxd5 Ndxe5 15. Nxe7+ Qxe7 16. Qe1 Rfe8 

As we will see, the rook is awkwardly placed on the e8 square. Other moves, such as …Bc4, …f6, or …Rad8 come to mind. 

  1. Qg3 Qb4 
    after ... Qb4

    This sets up a simple trap that white doesn’t fall for (Bxe5, Nxe5, Qxe5??, Bxb3). Better was …f6.
    1. Bh6 Ng6 19. Bd2 Qe4 20. Bd3 Qe5 21. Qf2 Qxb2 22. Rab1 Qf6 

    Probably not the best, as the endgame with two bishops favors white. Other tries were … Qa3 or …Qe5.
    1. Qxf6 gxf6 24. Nc5 Nce5 

    Not the best, in our view. Other moves to consider here were … f5 or … Nge5.
    1. Ne4 Red8 26. Nxf6+ Kg7 27. Nh5+  Kg8 28. Ba5 Rdc8 29. Rxb7 Nxd3 30. cxd3 Rc2 

    Probably not the best move in this position. Better is Rab8, hoping to simplify into an endgame with opposite colored bishops.  With … Rc2 it seems like black thinks he can play … Rxg2, Kxg2, Bd5+ winning back the rook and gaining a pawn. However, white can play … Rxg2, Nf6+, K-any, Kxg2 and now Bd5+ is not available as the knight covers that square.
    1. h3 Rac8 32. Bb6 Rd2 33. d4 Kh8 34. Nf6 Bc4 35. Rc1 Nh4

    Protecting the f7 pawn with Kg7 was better, but black is in serious trouble. Perhaps black was hoping to somehow trade his f7 pawn for white’s g2 pawn? The black knight and black bishop are being shut out of the game.

     

    1. Bc7 Ba2 37. Ne4 1-0
Blogs
All Blogs
Top Bloggers

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.