I am a retired mathematician and most definitely retired engineer.

I've also been married and divorced 3 times, which is a whole heck of a lot of failure right there. No one gets married and thinks "Oh, I'll do this for a while." It's supposed to be forever, "until death do us part", even though that is ever increasingly not the case any more.

And I've played the guitar for over 50 years, although I'm mostly retired from that as well; my hands don't work as well as they used to. I can still play with a pick however.

This is a nice, super easy, small arrangement of a piece of All Along The Watchtower, halfway between Dylan and Hendrix, only 3 chords, Cm Bb Ab. Just go down and back up. Try full barres, C at the 8th Fret, Bb at the 6th fret, Ab at the 4th Fret or triads at the 5th, 3rd and 1st frets, or whatever suits you; easy peasy.

why you play chess: Online chess is my OCD happy funtime, leisure activity.

When you learned: I think I learned how to play during the summer between 4th and 5th grade, so summer, 1965, when I was 10 years old, or I may have learned how to move the pieces earlier. It's just too hard to remember things from so long ago, and most of what I remember from way back isn't right anyway. In any case, I wasn't any good, at all, until my younger brother uncharacteristically bought a thin paperback book about chess when I was 13 years old and I read some of it, after which I could always easily beat my brother and my cousin. LOL.

I finally studied chess some in my early 50's, a few years after I retired the first time.

I used to teach Math here:

And then I got myself voluntarily involved in indentured servitude to the US Army Missile Command, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I really do not want to even think about those 18 years. I do sometimes, but I'd rather think about the Mandelbrot Set:

And I have done a whole heck of a lot of other stuff, as has everybody else I have ever known.

MENTAC