Noam D. Elkies Chess Pages Links

Chess Pages and Links

Course webpages for Freshman Seminar 23j: Chess and Mathematics
Fall 2003, Fall 2004, Spring [2005-]2006, Fall 2006

A few math papers on chess topics:

On numbers and endgames, pages 135-150 in Games of No Chance (R.J.Nowakowski, ed.; MSRI Publ. #29, 1996 via Cambridge Univ. Press; proceedings of the 7/94 MSRI conference on combinatorial games). math.NT/9905198 on the arXiv.
Higher Nimbers in pawn endgames on large chessboards, pages 61-78 in More Games of No Chance (R.J.Nowakowski, ed.; MSRI Publ. #42, 2002 via Cambridge Univ. Press; proceedings of the 7/00 MSRI workshop on combinatorial games). math.NT/0011253 on the arXiv.
The mathematical knight (with Richard Stanley), as either a PostScript or a PDF document. Published in Math. Intelligencer 25 #1 (2003), 22-34. [In the published paper, Diagram 11 is misprinted: it should have White and Black Kings on d1 and h8 respectively, White Knight on b2, and Black Pawn on a3, as seen in the PostScript and PDF versions linked above.]

My own chess playing career is not much to speak of -- I crossed the 2200 rating threshold for a ``Master'' title only at the age of 20, and stopped playing tournament chess a few years later with a rating of 2263, having played fewer than 100 rated games. (I was lucky to have a few piquant games in my tournament and blitz play, some of which might eventually find their way to this website.)

I'm rather better as a composer of chess studies and (more recently) other kinds of problems, mainly ``proof games''; one of these days I'll put my ``collected works'' of chess composition on the Web, but meanwhile you can find most of my studies (with at least the main line of each solution) at this site, which Lewis Stiller compiled from van der Heijden's database. [NB: this database includes some technical endgame analyses that aren't ``studies'', and some studies later shown incorrect (``cooked''); the first position you'll see in Stiller's site is an endgame analysis, and there are alas a few cooked studies later on.] Also, some of my ``proof game'' problems can be found on the Web using this Google query.

Besides chess play and chess composition, the World Chess Federation FIDE also organizes international contests in chess solving (under a time limit, with no computer assistance) and administers a rating and title system for solvers. There's an annual World Championship that takes place at the World Congress for Chess Composition. In 1996 the Congress happened to be in Tel Aviv during the same week that I was in town for a cousin's bar mitzvah. I qualified for the Championship by coming fifth at the pre-Championship ``Open Solving'' contest, and then -- to my surprise as much as anyone else's -- actually won the Championship the first time I ever competed in it. I've participated in four Championships since then; while I have yet to repeat as World Champion, I did well enough to earn a Solving Grandmaster title in 2001, and also was part of several first-place Israeli teams (the Championship is both an individual event and a competition between three-member national teams). See the solvingchess site for recent results, ratings, etc., and also this Chessbase article about the 2004 Championship in Greece.

[Eventually there'll be more stuff here.]

Never buy scoresheets again! Instead print out this simple PostScript scoresheet (actually a pair of identical 70-move scoresheets that fit on an 8.5x11-inch page).

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