How does math relate to chess?

Like Sine and Cosine your opponents opening attacks will flutuate.

Keep riding the x-axis to victory.

There are a lot of funny categories of personalities roaming this globe . I like the nerds , I am one myself you know. Nerds are weirdos always busy creating and solving unneccesary problems. Masochists .

Now a special sub-class of the nerds is the chessplayer  . He's even more degenerate. A nerd can show his face in public , mingle with people and socialize , but such priviliges are not given to the chessplayer. I would advice you to picture someone like GM Jonathan Speelman and wonder why kids shouldn't be afraid of this living scarecrow. Chessplayers never do good on TV .

Math people also belong to the nerd group . Special case is the chessplaying mathematician : these guys are beyond treatment. You can recognize them from afar : long unwashed hair , glasses , woolen sweater and slippers.

Seeing it this way : The relation between chess and math is that they are both nerdical mental excercises.

are you joking? Bobby Fischer was awesome on tv.

i dont know too much about Speelman to be honest thoúgh

I got mines! :D

there are numbers on a chess board.you can count them like math.

dont judje a cover by his book....

I've seen this man in real in Wijk aan Zee tournament. He is skinny and tall and a very friendly man. Nice guy .The scarecrow thing I said are his own words. He is English you know , English humor and stuff like that. It wasn't meant to offend the man.

According to me Maths is very much related to Maths.

There are many ways to solve a Maths problem. For example, when you are proving something in Maths, you can do so in more than one way. You keep thinking about like which is easiest way, which is less time consuming, etc. Even in chess you think like, what will happen if I play this, etc. So it is related to Maths somewhere or the other.

oh no no no...none taken....just my silly way.... 

@_36darshan-- said :

According to me Maths is very much related to Maths.

Can't argue with this one ...

oh that is english humor, i thought  john gleese is english humor

All I can say is : there are numbers on my bank-account too , mainly negative integers when expressed in cents. I can count it so it must be math.

Everything is made out of countable atoms and so is a chessboard. Atoms means physics so chess is applied physics . Physics uses the language of math to describe the relations between the observables (atoms : position,momentum i.e)  , this is called a formula or equation. It not only shows the relations,but it also provides you a method (algorithm) on how to extract the value of a certain variable. You see , relations and values (number) , that sounds like math to me.

The good Lord first created chess and some time after that he created the players and the universe around them.

@TetsuoSumo wrote about Speelman admitting he's a scarecrow:

oh that is english humor, i thought  john gleese is english humor

Yes , Gleese sure is and exponent. I like his humor , but I prefer Billy Connelly a Scotish standup comedian. He is loud and wild and uses rough language , not yer typical uppernose British stuff.

@rmurray ,

I knew it  ... I knew it .. nitpicking chick is back ...

Being a convinced atheist myself,I permitted myself the freedom to try to be figurative. I don't think understanding math will improve ones chess in anyway,but it helps to make use of the logics-part of math.Learning to think logical and structural etc.Separate cows from bees so to speak.

they both lead to the illusion of certainty and a consequent arrogance (that about sums it up)

pelly13 neglected to mention that Speelman is actually a mathematician AND a chessplayer, as is his compatriot, John Nunn.

Yes , I didn't want to alarm the readers too much.

I was sure about proffesor GM Nunn, but I thought GM Speelman studied English , have to check my source ...

Everybody can appreciate a good painting or a delicate piece of music. It is part of our deeper brain-system , it's as natural to us as having the ability to speak and to walk (or breath). It is all about our sensors , eyes and ears , and our motors , legs and arms.

Appreciating a nice math or phys-formula or a nice chess-position or a chess-combination is only possible when you are educated,specialized in the subject. It is not a natural thing . Learning to swim is easier than learning to play chess or solve a differential equation.

There is beauty in math , just look at Eulers equation : e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0 . It contains and relates all the primary numbers of math. 0 (Zero Murray) , 1 , pi(3.14) and e(2.71) and the imaginary number i .

There is beauty in phys too , look at Einsteins equation : E = mc^2 , very simple , but very deep philosophicaly .

And there is beauty in chess , often also because of the deep philosophics behind the position or combination.

People use pattern recognition , they do less good in calculus. Chess engines use brute-force calculations , but up to now they are fairly bad in pattern recognition. An interesting field for engine-designers. You can say that humans use a parallel processor (brain) and that engines use a serial processor.