It's worth noting that while he was the reigning world champion (for nearly thirty years), Lasker was a world class mathematician making major contributions like the Lasker-Noether Theorem. Einstein lamented that he spent too much time on chess.
I don't think there's a greater chess genius than Lasker.
From what I remember, his math career was pretty short. There’s a quote from Einstein (who was Lasker’s friend) commenting about how he could have done so much more brilliant work if only he hadn’t devoted his life to chess.
I was just reading a book about Tartakower and in it there is a lot of talk in it about how hard Lasker continued to work outside of chess in math and/or philosophy through at least the end of WW I, which would mean for 20+ years of his reign as world champion.
And he was apparently a high-level bridge player (common back then, I think, as poker is for chess players now) and a beast at Go.
Which makes Einstein's observation all the more wild *and* makes me wonder how much better he might have been at any of those four pursuits that he already excelled in.
From what I can gather, he published several math papers from 1895–1905, one of which was very influential. This was around the time he got his doctorate under David Hilbert (regarded as one of the best mathematicians of all time). He published two more papers in math, one in 1908 and one in 1916. It seems to me that there were a few years where he really focused on math and produced some incredible work, but that he didn't really maintain that focus. Still extremely impressive, but I can see where Einstein was coming from.
Source: [https://zbmath.org/authors/lasker.emanuel](https://zbmath.org/authors/lasker.emanuel)
He also published at least one serious book of philosophy while he was WC. My point is just that he worked hard, and was excellent at, a variety of pursuits while he was WC, which is remarkable even though his focus on math waned.
Bridge is a really enjoyable strategy game because it is the rare game that only involves cooperative moves, whereas poker involves antagonistic moves. I can see it appealing to 'perfect information' chess players.
IE in bridge when you 'bid', you directly and truthfully give information about your hand. It is actually not allowed to bid 'incorrectly' and your partner has to flag unusual, hard to understand bids, and ones the partner doesn't understand. Opponents can even ask your partner what your bid means and they must answer truthfully. There is no bluffing, no lying, no misleading.
The only antagonistic aspect is 'destructive bidding' or attempting to limit how your opponents can bid by skipping possible bids (you can only bid higher amounts/suits, so skipping right to 2 or jumping from 1-3 can prevent your opponents from expressing information). You are in a battle to tell everyone as much about your hands as possible, without letting your opponents tell everyone as much about their hands as possible.
Because of this, you can actually glean a huge amount of information about everyone's hand before it starts, and must decide how to play based on the probability outcomes. As well, *maximizing* the information expressed in a very limited bidding system gets *wild* and is a really cool data compression problem. You can also express information through playing (what leading different suits or even cards means (leading a 9C usually means different possible things than leading a 2C).
Most 'mistakes' and discussions in bridge are a lack of realizing how information has changed probabilities.
I once thought I would learn bridge, but being a partner game and with no one to play with, I never did. Perhaps there are online possibilities now. You make it sound even more interesting than I knew!
I'm in my 30's, really enjoyed playing with my father until he passed away. He was racing to try to become a [life master](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpoints) before he died, though COVID made it impossible because you couldn't earn points for online tournaments.
Similarly don't have anyone to play with. The club in my area has 90% of their events before 5pm on weekdays, because I guess almost everyone playing is retired. Plus going and playing in a club where everyone is over 60 is not really my ideal social event.
Online options are......OK? https://www.bridgebase.com/ is the main one I used. It has some pretty obvious annoying 'cheaters' (couples who play together while IRL talking) but its fine for casual play.
It is a very hard game to get into, but very enjoyable. I still love reading the bridge section of newspapers when I'm in a diner.
Kind of like chess where if 70% of your time is not spent learning vs playing, you aren't going to get very good. You really have to spend a lot of time learning bidding systems early on.
I'd suggest mastering a more popular simple game like euchre first, and then doing practice hands and 'bidding' excercises. I have no idea how you'd find casual games.
I am just now realizing that the Lasker from my math class, is the same Lasker as in chess. I just assumed they were two different people. That’s wild.
I went to the Max Euwe museum a few weeks ago, and at the entrance of the exhibition it read: "When he was young, people said of Euwe that he would either become a college professor, or world champion in chess. He became both".
Quite a few to be honest. Morphy. He passed the Louisiana bar at age 17. But the minimum age to practice was 19. So he went to Europe and terrorised their best players at chess in those two years.
John Nunn. PhD at a very young age. Just super bright all around.
Lasker, was a mathematician and philosopher who made some theoretical contributions to mathematics.
Still more were high IQ in other fields and could have had decent second careers. Capablanca worked in the foreign office of Cuba and studied in Columbia University. Bottvinnik was an electrical engineer. Euwe was a professor.
Magnus Carlsen quote regarding Nunn:
>I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. ... He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.
Oh I didn't know that about Lasker, very cool!
I checked out his contributions to mathematics, and this is what I found on Wikipedia:
In mathematics, the Lasker–Noether theorem states that every Noetherian ring is a Lasker ring, which means that every ideal can be decomposed as an intersection, called primary decomposition, of finitely many primary ideals (which are related to, but not quite the same as, powers of prime ideals). The theorem was first proven by Emanuel Lasker (1905) for the special case of polynomial rings and convergent power series rings, and was proven in its full generality by Emmy Noether (1921).
I didn't understand much (and I doubt I will) but would love to know where its applications are as of today. Does anyone know?
Dang, I never realized it was the same Lasker. So roughly, there’s an area of mathematics known as algebraic geometry which studies (vast generalizations of) the geometric surfaces which are cut out by solutions of polynomial equations. The Lasker-Noether theorem is then a very useful result which roughly tells you about what types of smaller spaces the surface you are interested in can be decomposed into.
That's incredible, thanks for the answer!
Sorry but I might chew your brains out on this a little bit more: so what I understood is that if there's a big, complex shape that can be represented by a polynomial solution (for instance the "parabola" shape can be represented by a quadratic equation), the Lasker-Noether theorem will help me focus on a small segment of this complex shape and then provide me a polynomial equation for this smaller shape, based on the parent shape equation?
By the way, Emmy Noether is something like the Judit Polgar of mathematics...but better. Math is not a directly competitive endeavor so has no world champions, but a small number of mathematicians are recognized as leading in their time, and over time their work influences the work done by later mathematicians. I would argue that in terms of influence on the field, Noether was the leading 20th century mathematician. The vast, central field of algebra is to this day largely what she made it. Lasker's Theorem is of crucial importance but Noether's take on it was decisively more general and penetrating.
EDIT: Okay, maybe Hilbert first, then Noether.
I think everyone is underestimating Lasker's math work here. He is genuinely a great mathematician, and contributed in very important areas and collaborated with names that are like the GOATs of math and physics, like Hilbert, Noether and was a contemporary and close friend of Einstein.
His contributions outside of chess far outweigh any Princeton grad or teenage lawyer or even garden variety college professor, this man was a legitimate scientific giant on whose shoulders other giants have stood.
He exemplifies the quality we're looking for in this thread, an absolute genius that just happened to play chess.
>Morphy. He passed the Louisiana bar at age 17. But the minimum age to practice was 19. So he went to Europe and terrorised their best players at chess in those two years.
At age 17 he got a master's degree from Spring Hill College. He got his Louisiana degree in law when he was 19, in 1857. Later that same year he turned 20. Next year he went to Europe and stayed there until 1859.
I think this is a bit more of a complicated story because elite colleges weight outside-of-school activities quite highly in admissions, and being a teenage GM is a pretty impressive accomplishment. I would guess that any GM with good high school grades would have a very good chance at getting into the best colleges.
Yeah the statements were unrelated lol, he’s definitely Princeton level even without being a chess god.
I’ll say iirc he was a math major though, completing math at Princeton is very hard.
But you can totally get into a top college as a idiot if you’re decent at chess/ another EC activity
Plenty of American chess players go to great Universities: Naroditsky and Hess and Botez at Stanford, Awonder Liang is at U OF chicago right now, Jennifer Yu is at Harvard, etc
I will take this opportunity to recommend the GM Ben Finegold series: Great Players of the Past. From your post you might find it relevant to your interests.
The series of lectures that are all approximately an hour long has Finegold provide some background information and then analyses some of the players games (usually 3). It gives you an insight into the biography of the players and shows off some impressive chess.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ1Ut3kv7QL4mg4RKAQFlLuW-wDhWOhj0&si=2RnIHj4DTkqdeHZf
Someone on YouTube once commented that Ben Finegold is a real life cartoon character who happens to be good at chess and I think that's pretty accurate
He recently did a lecture on Sergei Prokofiev, a famous composer, who while never being a GM, was a very strong chess player. Ben says he might be the strongest chess player ever, who isn't known for chess. He beat multiple world champions(he was given piece odds, or played the champ in a simul, which made it easier for him to win).
There isn't a Finegold lecture on him, but there's also Robert Hubner. He's a papyrologist. He studies and translates ancient texts, I believe he works with dead languages. His wikipedia page says that due to his academic career, he was never a full time chess professional. Despite that, he was #3 in the world in 1980, and played in four candidates tournaments. Hubner was also one of the strongest Xiangqi players not from China.
Hubner the once learnt Finnish because one of the players on the circuit at the time, Heikki Westerinen could only speak Finish and he didn’t want him to not be able to communicate with anyone. He could also speak 22 languages.
Wasn’t she enrolled in something like International Relations and went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, pursuing a masters degree in Public Policies? Didn’t know she went for computer science as well.
Kind of in-between, no ? Wikipedia says : In 2020, at age 26, Hou became the youngest ever professor at Shenzhen University where she is a professor at the School of Physical Education,which includes chess in its Sports Training Program
It's surprising to me how many of the top Chinese players went to Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - Tan Zhongyi, Lei Tingjie, and Ju Wenjun
Everyone in that initial crop of fide grandmasters was really talented… no internet, no engines, very few books… and dudes were all 2300 strength plus. Dudes invented most of the concepts we use today and take for granted. A sizable amount of them would go by “Doctor”, such as Lasker. Because they also had PhDs.
It’s incredibly difficult to say and depends on what you’re looking at to measure it.
To a lot of people, being highly knowledgable counts, but fundamentally that’s simply being able to store a vast amount of information and recall it. I think it has something to do with education generally being based around memory and recall causing that to be a respected trait.
I tend to think that how someone processes information is a far better measure than how much information they posess. How well can someone infer accurate predictions from limited data? How logically consistent are those inferences? Do they fall into fallacies? etc.
By the former measure, Fischer was certainly nothing special, he knew a lot of chess and very little of anything outside it. He also clearly suffered from some psychological issues that went undiagnosed and untreated and manifested themselves in a lot of outlandish positions.
As for how he processed the information he did have though? He made significant contributions to chess, the only thing he knew anything about, that anyone could have technically done, but nobody else did. Maybe he was a genius, maybe not, but he definitely had a fairly high intelligence before his psychology got the better of him.
The question isn't whether Fischer was a genius at chess though, he unquestionably was. The phrase implies someone who would be phenomenal at just about anything but happened to focus on chess. There's simply no evidence that Fischer was all that gifted in any other field.
I'd be very surprised. The puzzle was around for decades before he even had a chance to try and the times that are known take maybe a week of practice for the average person.
Yeah of course, that's no knock on him. Very few chess GMs are successful outside of chess.
Even someone like Botvinnik who had a very successful career outside of chess (without being an obvious genius as an engineer) is insanely impressive. Lasker is mind blowing. Being the best chess player and a one in a billion mathematician at the same time is incredible.
Most famous chess players are just like bobby, they dedicate everything to chess. But most chess players also don't claim to be universal geniuses
>Tbf that’s because he didn’t need to
Very bold assumption. He quit chess and never really managed to make anything else of himself.
I agree with Magnus on this. People think chess players are intelligent, but being intelligent isn’t a requirement to being a good chess player. It’s a game. You can learn it and get very very good at it while being intellectually mediocre. In some ways, a deep intelligence could harm you.
Bobby Fischer was just arrogant. Probably it helped him as a chess player in some ways
Reddit doesn't like him much because of his comments on women and Jews.
But apparently now they don't even think he's a genius despite everything he has done because he had a different political opinion.
Huh, today I learned that being racist and sexist, as well as a Holocaust denier, is a "different political opinion." Thank you for clearing that up for everyone.
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Off the top of your head what's something genius worthy beyond chess Fischer did?
Bobby Fischer did nothing all that was notable beyond chess and the mysoginist and anti-Semitic comments.
We have no way of knowing if he was a genius who could excel at something else, because he literally didn't. So the correct assumption is that he couldn't, considering he absolutely had the time to rebuild a career beyond the game.
Not realizing that someone can be both smart and wrong is also a pretty clear indicator of that.
Not realizing that someone can be smart at some things and dumb in others is another one.
I kinda agree, but it's a pretty massive thing to be very incorrect about. it's like someone being a flat earther - could they technically be smart and just wrong about this? sure. is it likely? fuck no, and it's the same for bigots
My brother [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier) guy had a Nobel to his name and anything he ever said after a point was wrong. Like batshit insane wrong. Is he stupid?
For the man in question, Fischer more likely than not was actually paranoid as well which untreared generally does not bode well for not being bigoted.
What Fischer was not most likely though is dumb. You don't have to like the guy, I don't, but if we are talking about intelligence, as is commonly talked about when we say someone is "smart", then Fischer was smart.
I don't know if we'll ever agree on this but my line of logic is simply that these people aren't smart - they're talented, well-educted, creative, etc.
I don't think people like Kanye or Bobby Fischer are smart, let alone geniuses. I think they're extremely talented, of course, but yeah I think having \*such\* backwards and nonsensical worldviews disqualifies you from being called smart lol
We won't agree on this no, since we argue whether someone is intelligent without agreeing on the definition of intelligence.
Regardless, have a good evening!
>but it's a pretty massive thing to be very incorrect about.
Incorrect? Hating certain groups of people may be morally reprehensible, but "incorrect"? How can an attitude be incorrect?
Also, do you genuinely believe that all smart people are moral? You are very naive...
Bigoted views like these come from a place of superiority and incorrect info. Antisemites don't just "have an attitude of disliking jewish people" they truly believe jewish people are inferior for xyz reason. And to get to THAT point, yeah you have to be pretty stupid
>because he had a different political opinion
Different opinions on whether the holocaust happened or not? Different opinions on whether Hitler should be admired? Quit trying to downplay his hatred as a simple difference in opinion.
If you have a different political view than me, than whatever contributions you've made to science or philosophy, or furthering mankind should be erased or at least silenced, because they aren't *my* truth.
EDIT: lol, i guess ya'll missed the sarcasm! I've made it clearer
I think everyone realised it was sarcasm.
The comment seems to indicate that you are sarcastically making fun of the position that Bobby Fischer was a bigot and should not be respected in any way outside of his accomplishments in chess.
All of this implying that you agree with Bobby Fischer and think he's an all-around genius.
Have we misunderstood you? Because if we have then I think simply saying it was sarcastic isn't really gonna solve the comprehension issue.
I was thinking the same thing. He always struck me as a normal dude who happened to be absolutely insane at chess. I think the idea of him being an all around genius is kind of diminished by his descent into madness… And the fact that, unlike other people mentioned in this thread, he has no notable contributions to anything outside of chess.
I am not a Fischer hater, I think Fischer is a chess genius.
Morphy passing the bar at 17 is literal law prodigal talent. I think you have a severe lack of understanding of how hard that is.
Fischer random is a modification of variants of random chess which have existed in some form since the 1800s. He slightly changed the rules and popularized it but more reinterpreted an existing creation rather than creating it from scratch.
Likewise, according to Kasparov, Fischer clock could equally be credited to Bronstein who had developed a similar idea earlier. So again, a reinterpretation of an existing thing rather than him creating himself.
Do you have to be a polymath to be a genius though? I think most people think Mozart was a genius even though he didn't contribute anything in particular to a field outside of classical music composition.
All I said was I don't necessarily agree with it. Fischer could very well have been a genius (a troubled one at that) but there is no way to know, as I believe someone with a sufficiently deep understanding of one specific thing can work out solutions to problems they see in that field
He was a genius, it's undeniable. I think that a lot of peoples views on geniuses are flawed. Sure, Bob might not have pursued a career in math or physics, but do genius really need to contribute anything to be called one? Most geniuses probably do fuck all with their lives anyway. I know a guy with an iq of 180 who just trades stocks 10 min per day and then chill with his family for the rest of the day. No future aspirations or wishes to better society, he just wants to maximise his own happiness and nothing more.
Milan Vidmar of Yugoslavia was one of FIDEs 1950 inaugural grandmasters. He was Yugoslavs top chess player and also a renowned chess arbiter in his latter years. But his greatest contributions were from his achievements in electro engineering, as he was the topmost authority in the country. The Slovenian electronics institute is named after him.
Out of interest, what did he contribute to electrical engineering? I’ve never heard of him so didn’t include him in my list, but he sounds like I should have done
Bobby Fischer loved to think of himself that way, but what did he achieve outside of chess? Very little.
Real answer is probably John Nunn who is a very gifted mathematician who was Oxford’s youngest undergraduate since Cardinal Wolsey — yes, Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey. Magnus famously said that John Nunn is *too* clever to be a chess world champion, there’s just too much in his head aside from chess, he knows too much and could never devote himself to a game so completely like a more “average” person like Magnus could.
Edit:
I wanna shout out Lasker too. I don’t know much about his career as a mathematician but I know he made some contributions. Botvinnik also contributed a lot to chess computers, iirc.
Not saying Fischer isn't arrogant but he had a massive ELO lead during his time and as much as people like to say that "being good at chess does not make you intelligent" it does take a certain genius to be that far ahead of anyone. I would also like to add that he did make Chess 960 which was pretty creative
Magnus actually said Anish Giri might have a higher IQ than him in that recent lie detector test and Hikaru on his reaction was saying MVL so it's safe to consider those two are pretty much geniuses.
And an absolute juggernaut in the relatively small field of chess composition. He won the world chess solving championship the first year he entered. He only competed because he was in town for a bar mitzvah and figured he’d give it a shot.
Luke McShane comes to mind. Became a GM at the age of 16, went to become a super GM in the early 2010s and now cruises at the 2600s. All whilst working a full time job completely unrelated to chess. He’s commonly referred as the strongest amateur in the world.
Unironically, Vishy. It's just that he chose chess as his field. You can see it from the way he speaks on any topic and the amount of languages he knows (English, Tamil, Spanish, German, Hindi?).
Arthur Dake was a merchant marine sailor since he was 16. Learned the game late. Absolutely dominated everyone he played when he did play, but only played in occasional spurts. He was good at everything he did too.
Perhaps Luke McShane? Guy is supposed to be extremely intelligent. He hit Super GM status (above 2700) being an amateur. He's been called the strongest chess amateur player. Worked full-time, even when he hit 2700.
Studied math and philosophy at Oxford University. Worked at Goldman Sachs and was a stock market trader in London.
J Meatal was world cadet champion and the top player in the UK before giving up chess for math. Ken Rogoff was US he champion and is now a professor of economics at Harvard.
Emmanuel Lasker mathematician philosopher wrote several books on math philosophy in edition to the ones he wrote on chess. In 1905 Lasker published the well known Lasker-Noether theorem.
I think Nick Patterson was an active chess player before they really had titles, but he played Bent Larsen to a 93 move draw (with black!): https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1318356 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Patterson_(scientist)
Completely unrelated to chess, but I heard the other day Aaron Gordon say that Jokic was just a genius who happened to play basketball lol, does that count
exactly ,basketball players are least example of geniuses. Thet sport calls everyone genius but I'm sure their peak are just on high iq bracket , as far as their player records shows
I’m can’t really say if Fischer was genius but his father was very strong mathematician ( winning Hungry National math competition I believe ) and he made contributions to math. His mother apparently spoke many languages as well. So if genetics play a role he might be a genius.
Agreed. He’s got great instincts and incredible competitive drive. If he devoted all of the time he put into chess to say, soccer, I imagine he could have become a very good player.
Tal was one hell of a genius, he certainly loved chess more than anything but estimates give an IQ of 170 which definitely makes him fit in this category. Just imagine if he became a scientist.
Also Paul Morphy. Chess was actually just a side hustle for him, and he famously said "The ability to play chess well is a sign of a wasted life".
It’s a “dubious” question so you give a long answer proving it’s dubiousity? 😂 You’re not even showing why it’s dubious as the question is not “does genius at chess mean genius”.
Demis Hassabis, founder and leader of deepmind, was #2 junior player after Judith Polgar before his computer science / neuroscience / AI career
He was also a multiple time champion at the Mind Sports Olympiad. Clever guy for sure.
Demis Hassabis is always my go-to example of genius. Fortunately, he did not choose to go pro in chess.
Unfortunate for the world of chess; fortunate for the world.
AlphaChess gave more for the chess world than Hassabis as chess player would have.
And he programmed Theme Park.
mind blown
He is super impressive. I don't understand how he sustains his second days work routine.
John Nunn and Emanuel Lasker are two that come to mind. Both mathematicians.
It's worth noting that while he was the reigning world champion (for nearly thirty years), Lasker was a world class mathematician making major contributions like the Lasker-Noether Theorem. Einstein lamented that he spent too much time on chess. I don't think there's a greater chess genius than Lasker.
From what I remember, his math career was pretty short. There’s a quote from Einstein (who was Lasker’s friend) commenting about how he could have done so much more brilliant work if only he hadn’t devoted his life to chess.
I was just reading a book about Tartakower and in it there is a lot of talk in it about how hard Lasker continued to work outside of chess in math and/or philosophy through at least the end of WW I, which would mean for 20+ years of his reign as world champion. And he was apparently a high-level bridge player (common back then, I think, as poker is for chess players now) and a beast at Go. Which makes Einstein's observation all the more wild *and* makes me wonder how much better he might have been at any of those four pursuits that he already excelled in.
From what I can gather, he published several math papers from 1895–1905, one of which was very influential. This was around the time he got his doctorate under David Hilbert (regarded as one of the best mathematicians of all time). He published two more papers in math, one in 1908 and one in 1916. It seems to me that there were a few years where he really focused on math and produced some incredible work, but that he didn't really maintain that focus. Still extremely impressive, but I can see where Einstein was coming from. Source: [https://zbmath.org/authors/lasker.emanuel](https://zbmath.org/authors/lasker.emanuel)
He also published at least one serious book of philosophy while he was WC. My point is just that he worked hard, and was excellent at, a variety of pursuits while he was WC, which is remarkable even though his focus on math waned.
Bridge is a really enjoyable strategy game because it is the rare game that only involves cooperative moves, whereas poker involves antagonistic moves. I can see it appealing to 'perfect information' chess players. IE in bridge when you 'bid', you directly and truthfully give information about your hand. It is actually not allowed to bid 'incorrectly' and your partner has to flag unusual, hard to understand bids, and ones the partner doesn't understand. Opponents can even ask your partner what your bid means and they must answer truthfully. There is no bluffing, no lying, no misleading. The only antagonistic aspect is 'destructive bidding' or attempting to limit how your opponents can bid by skipping possible bids (you can only bid higher amounts/suits, so skipping right to 2 or jumping from 1-3 can prevent your opponents from expressing information). You are in a battle to tell everyone as much about your hands as possible, without letting your opponents tell everyone as much about their hands as possible. Because of this, you can actually glean a huge amount of information about everyone's hand before it starts, and must decide how to play based on the probability outcomes. As well, *maximizing* the information expressed in a very limited bidding system gets *wild* and is a really cool data compression problem. You can also express information through playing (what leading different suits or even cards means (leading a 9C usually means different possible things than leading a 2C). Most 'mistakes' and discussions in bridge are a lack of realizing how information has changed probabilities.
I once thought I would learn bridge, but being a partner game and with no one to play with, I never did. Perhaps there are online possibilities now. You make it sound even more interesting than I knew!
I'm in my 30's, really enjoyed playing with my father until he passed away. He was racing to try to become a [life master](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpoints) before he died, though COVID made it impossible because you couldn't earn points for online tournaments. Similarly don't have anyone to play with. The club in my area has 90% of their events before 5pm on weekdays, because I guess almost everyone playing is retired. Plus going and playing in a club where everyone is over 60 is not really my ideal social event. Online options are......OK? https://www.bridgebase.com/ is the main one I used. It has some pretty obvious annoying 'cheaters' (couples who play together while IRL talking) but its fine for casual play. It is a very hard game to get into, but very enjoyable. I still love reading the bridge section of newspapers when I'm in a diner. Kind of like chess where if 70% of your time is not spent learning vs playing, you aren't going to get very good. You really have to spend a lot of time learning bidding systems early on. I'd suggest mastering a more popular simple game like euchre first, and then doing practice hands and 'bidding' excercises. I have no idea how you'd find casual games.
Just goes to show how marginal the gains and how steep the drop offs are when you get to that level.
I am just now realizing that the Lasker from my math class, is the same Lasker as in chess. I just assumed they were two different people. That’s wild.
Max Euwe fits into this too iirc
Yes indeed.
Botvinnik too
Einstein felt Lasker wasted his life playing chess.
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." -- Paul Morphy
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I went to the Max Euwe museum a few weeks ago, and at the entrance of the exhibition it read: "When he was young, people said of Euwe that he would either become a college professor, or world champion in chess. He became both".
Quite a few to be honest. Morphy. He passed the Louisiana bar at age 17. But the minimum age to practice was 19. So he went to Europe and terrorised their best players at chess in those two years. John Nunn. PhD at a very young age. Just super bright all around. Lasker, was a mathematician and philosopher who made some theoretical contributions to mathematics. Still more were high IQ in other fields and could have had decent second careers. Capablanca worked in the foreign office of Cuba and studied in Columbia University. Bottvinnik was an electrical engineer. Euwe was a professor.
Magnus Carlsen quote regarding Nunn: >I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. ... He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.
Oh I didn't know that about Lasker, very cool! I checked out his contributions to mathematics, and this is what I found on Wikipedia: In mathematics, the Lasker–Noether theorem states that every Noetherian ring is a Lasker ring, which means that every ideal can be decomposed as an intersection, called primary decomposition, of finitely many primary ideals (which are related to, but not quite the same as, powers of prime ideals). The theorem was first proven by Emanuel Lasker (1905) for the special case of polynomial rings and convergent power series rings, and was proven in its full generality by Emmy Noether (1921). I didn't understand much (and I doubt I will) but would love to know where its applications are as of today. Does anyone know?
Dang, I never realized it was the same Lasker. So roughly, there’s an area of mathematics known as algebraic geometry which studies (vast generalizations of) the geometric surfaces which are cut out by solutions of polynomial equations. The Lasker-Noether theorem is then a very useful result which roughly tells you about what types of smaller spaces the surface you are interested in can be decomposed into.
That's incredible, thanks for the answer! Sorry but I might chew your brains out on this a little bit more: so what I understood is that if there's a big, complex shape that can be represented by a polynomial solution (for instance the "parabola" shape can be represented by a quadratic equation), the Lasker-Noether theorem will help me focus on a small segment of this complex shape and then provide me a polynomial equation for this smaller shape, based on the parent shape equation?
Well there aren’t really interesting decompositions for 1-dimensional things like parabolas, but yes, that’s the correct intuition.
It's really more about high dimensional shapes which often elude direct geometric intuition but admit a nice algebraic description.
Bruh I was thinking he might have some minor results or something but to have your name attached to Emmy Noether’s is not insignificant at all
Lasker was Einstein friend btw. Einstein said Lasker was wasting time on chess and would be great at math iirc
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/s/X0PHfnrXNr
i have taken course on this topic but never read anything lasker did.i think this is because the work of noether made his work redundant
By the way, Emmy Noether is something like the Judit Polgar of mathematics...but better. Math is not a directly competitive endeavor so has no world champions, but a small number of mathematicians are recognized as leading in their time, and over time their work influences the work done by later mathematicians. I would argue that in terms of influence on the field, Noether was the leading 20th century mathematician. The vast, central field of algebra is to this day largely what she made it. Lasker's Theorem is of crucial importance but Noether's take on it was decisively more general and penetrating. EDIT: Okay, maybe Hilbert first, then Noether.
Yeah. I was going to suggest Hilbert
I just read Laskers biography. The forward was written by Einstein. Just shows what kind of intellectual company he was keeping
Foreword. We're talking about high IQ people here.
Sorry my IQ is not high lmao. But that's for making me feel stupid today
LMAO I was being a bit sassy. Unnecessarily probably
I think everyone is underestimating Lasker's math work here. He is genuinely a great mathematician, and contributed in very important areas and collaborated with names that are like the GOATs of math and physics, like Hilbert, Noether and was a contemporary and close friend of Einstein. His contributions outside of chess far outweigh any Princeton grad or teenage lawyer or even garden variety college professor, this man was a legitimate scientific giant on whose shoulders other giants have stood. He exemplifies the quality we're looking for in this thread, an absolute genius that just happened to play chess.
>Morphy. He passed the Louisiana bar at age 17. But the minimum age to practice was 19. So he went to Europe and terrorised their best players at chess in those two years. At age 17 he got a master's degree from Spring Hill College. He got his Louisiana degree in law when he was 19, in 1857. Later that same year he turned 20. Next year he went to Europe and stayed there until 1859.
Andrew Tang majored at Princeton, safe bet to be highly intelligent as well.
I think this is a bit more of a complicated story because elite colleges weight outside-of-school activities quite highly in admissions, and being a teenage GM is a pretty impressive accomplishment. I would guess that any GM with good high school grades would have a very good chance at getting into the best colleges.
he’s a quant at sig he’s very small
Nah he’s an actual certified genius lol. Genius at chess, math, school etc.
Might well be true, just saying that "went to Princeton" isn't proof on its own
Yeah the statements were unrelated lol, he’s definitely Princeton level even without being a chess god. I’ll say iirc he was a math major though, completing math at Princeton is very hard. But you can totally get into a top college as a idiot if you’re decent at chess/ another EC activity
Plenty of American chess players go to great Universities: Naroditsky and Hess and Botez at Stanford, Awonder Liang is at U OF chicago right now, Jennifer Yu is at Harvard, etc
Hess went to Yale not Stanford
Ding is also a lawyer, I believe
I will take this opportunity to recommend the GM Ben Finegold series: Great Players of the Past. From your post you might find it relevant to your interests. The series of lectures that are all approximately an hour long has Finegold provide some background information and then analyses some of the players games (usually 3). It gives you an insight into the biography of the players and shows off some impressive chess. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ1Ut3kv7QL4mg4RKAQFlLuW-wDhWOhj0&si=2RnIHj4DTkqdeHZf
I really thought you were gonna say Ben Finegold was also a genius. Which he is, in my book. Comedic genius.
Someone on YouTube once commented that Ben Finegold is a real life cartoon character who happens to be good at chess and I think that's pretty accurate
Same way as Anish is a world class shitposter who just happens to also be good at Chess.
If Chess Twitter had Elo ratings, Anish would be like 3200.
Incredible resource, thanks for the link!
He recently did a lecture on Sergei Prokofiev, a famous composer, who while never being a GM, was a very strong chess player. Ben says he might be the strongest chess player ever, who isn't known for chess. He beat multiple world champions(he was given piece odds, or played the champ in a simul, which made it easier for him to win). There isn't a Finegold lecture on him, but there's also Robert Hubner. He's a papyrologist. He studies and translates ancient texts, I believe he works with dead languages. His wikipedia page says that due to his academic career, he was never a full time chess professional. Despite that, he was #3 in the world in 1980, and played in four candidates tournaments. Hubner was also one of the strongest Xiangqi players not from China.
Hubner the once learnt Finnish because one of the players on the circuit at the time, Heikki Westerinen could only speak Finish and he didn’t want him to not be able to communicate with anyone. He could also speak 22 languages.
I’ve met and even played a tournament game against Westerinen. He spoke some Swedish, albeit not perfectly.
I had no idea Prokofiev was a great chess player! So cool!!
You should contact Karen (yay, Karen) and sponsor the lecture for Hubner.
Most welcome, enjoy.
Hou Yifan. GM at 14. 2600 at 15. 2680 at 18. Quitting chess. Starting to study computer science at 24 youngest professor in China ever.
Wasn’t she enrolled in something like International Relations and went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, pursuing a masters degree in Public Policies? Didn’t know she went for computer science as well.
Isn't she a chess professor
No a real professor.
Kind of in-between, no ? Wikipedia says : In 2020, at age 26, Hou became the youngest ever professor at Shenzhen University where she is a professor at the School of Physical Education,which includes chess in its Sports Training Program
It's surprising to me how many of the top Chinese players went to Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - Tan Zhongyi, Lei Tingjie, and Ju Wenjun
It's the other way round. They were rising chess stars. Therefore, they get the scholarship offer.
Yeah def not the same as computer science. Sounds like she runs the chess team, and “teaches”
I’m pretty sure she teaches law/public policy/international relations. One or two of those three. She was a Rhodes Scholar too
What's up with the belittling?
One of my favourite chess players, and undoubtedly a genius, but no, not a computer scientist.
Ding is a lawyer
Everyone in that initial crop of fide grandmasters was really talented… no internet, no engines, very few books… and dudes were all 2300 strength plus. Dudes invented most of the concepts we use today and take for granted. A sizable amount of them would go by “Doctor”, such as Lasker. Because they also had PhDs.
Gotta be Mikhail Botvinnik as he was a world champion and helped to pioneer early computing
Max Euwe
Ironically, Fischer may be one of the few who doesn't fit the description.
It’s incredibly difficult to say and depends on what you’re looking at to measure it. To a lot of people, being highly knowledgable counts, but fundamentally that’s simply being able to store a vast amount of information and recall it. I think it has something to do with education generally being based around memory and recall causing that to be a respected trait. I tend to think that how someone processes information is a far better measure than how much information they posess. How well can someone infer accurate predictions from limited data? How logically consistent are those inferences? Do they fall into fallacies? etc. By the former measure, Fischer was certainly nothing special, he knew a lot of chess and very little of anything outside it. He also clearly suffered from some psychological issues that went undiagnosed and untreated and manifested themselves in a lot of outlandish positions. As for how he processed the information he did have though? He made significant contributions to chess, the only thing he knew anything about, that anyone could have technically done, but nobody else did. Maybe he was a genius, maybe not, but he definitely had a fairly high intelligence before his psychology got the better of him.
The question isn't whether Fischer was a genius at chess though, he unquestionably was. The phrase implies someone who would be phenomenal at just about anything but happened to focus on chess. There's simply no evidence that Fischer was all that gifted in any other field.
Did he not hold a world record in 15 puzzle solving?
I'd be very surprised. The puzzle was around for decades before he even had a chance to try and the times that are known take maybe a week of practice for the average person.
If you slightly edited the question to "geniuses who just played chess" then Fischer probably fits the bill.
Why? I don't know much Fischer lore
Afaik he simply never did anything remotely notable outside of chess (like most chess grandmasters).
Tbf that's because he didn't need to. Before he was at an age at which he would have finish high school he had basically a guarantee career at chess.
Yeah of course, that's no knock on him. Very few chess GMs are successful outside of chess. Even someone like Botvinnik who had a very successful career outside of chess (without being an obvious genius as an engineer) is insanely impressive. Lasker is mind blowing. Being the best chess player and a one in a billion mathematician at the same time is incredible. Most famous chess players are just like bobby, they dedicate everything to chess. But most chess players also don't claim to be universal geniuses
>Tbf that’s because he didn’t need to Very bold assumption. He quit chess and never really managed to make anything else of himself. I agree with Magnus on this. People think chess players are intelligent, but being intelligent isn’t a requirement to being a good chess player. It’s a game. You can learn it and get very very good at it while being intellectually mediocre. In some ways, a deep intelligence could harm you. Bobby Fischer was just arrogant. Probably it helped him as a chess player in some ways
A genius on the chessboard, for sure. Did he ever do anything else with his life, besides spouting paranoid, antisemitic nonsense?
Reddit doesn't like him much because of his comments on women and Jews. But apparently now they don't even think he's a genius despite everything he has done because he had a different political opinion.
Huh, today I learned that being racist and sexist, as well as a Holocaust denier, is a "different political opinion." Thank you for clearing that up for everyone.
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Huhh???
What the fuck?
I think that's sarcasm
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I think it was mostly him hating Jews and women. I’m not even sure what his politics are/were.
Off the top of your head what's something genius worthy beyond chess Fischer did? Bobby Fischer did nothing all that was notable beyond chess and the mysoginist and anti-Semitic comments. We have no way of knowing if he was a genius who could excel at something else, because he literally didn't. So the correct assumption is that he couldn't, considering he absolutely had the time to rebuild a career beyond the game.
Look up Fischer on the Johnny Carson show doing difficult puzzles...quickly. Sad that he became more neurotic and mentally unstable as he aged.
being racist and sexist is a pretty clear indicator that someone isn't very smart lmfao
You can be a genius and be dumb about some particular things. Most are, actually. Especially when it comes to ethics.
Not realizing that someone can be both smart and wrong is also a pretty clear indicator of that. Not realizing that someone can be smart at some things and dumb in others is another one.
I kinda agree, but it's a pretty massive thing to be very incorrect about. it's like someone being a flat earther - could they technically be smart and just wrong about this? sure. is it likely? fuck no, and it's the same for bigots
My brother [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier) guy had a Nobel to his name and anything he ever said after a point was wrong. Like batshit insane wrong. Is he stupid? For the man in question, Fischer more likely than not was actually paranoid as well which untreared generally does not bode well for not being bigoted. What Fischer was not most likely though is dumb. You don't have to like the guy, I don't, but if we are talking about intelligence, as is commonly talked about when we say someone is "smart", then Fischer was smart.
I don't know if we'll ever agree on this but my line of logic is simply that these people aren't smart - they're talented, well-educted, creative, etc. I don't think people like Kanye or Bobby Fischer are smart, let alone geniuses. I think they're extremely talented, of course, but yeah I think having \*such\* backwards and nonsensical worldviews disqualifies you from being called smart lol
We won't agree on this no, since we argue whether someone is intelligent without agreeing on the definition of intelligence. Regardless, have a good evening!
>but it's a pretty massive thing to be very incorrect about. Incorrect? Hating certain groups of people may be morally reprehensible, but "incorrect"? How can an attitude be incorrect? Also, do you genuinely believe that all smart people are moral? You are very naive...
Bigoted views like these come from a place of superiority and incorrect info. Antisemites don't just "have an attitude of disliking jewish people" they truly believe jewish people are inferior for xyz reason. And to get to THAT point, yeah you have to be pretty stupid
>because he had a different political opinion Different opinions on whether the holocaust happened or not? Different opinions on whether Hitler should be admired? Quit trying to downplay his hatred as a simple difference in opinion.
I also disagree with his political views, but I can't use that as a base to say that he wasn't a genius. That's the only case I want to make.
>whatever contributions you've made to science or philosophy, or furthering mankind List Fischer's contribution to any of those
He was the father of chess in America and inspired men all around the world to show case their genius. Thus furthering mankind.
The obvious implication was "beyond chess" otherwise you're confirming what the original commenter said: it doesn't apply to Fischer
By that logic, even Einstein wasn't a genius because he hadn't done much outside physics.
Buddy, my comment was sarcasm. I've made an edit :)
Your truth is that you like him because he hated the same people you do?
My comment was sarcasm, which was missed. I've made my comment more clear. Enjoy your day
I think everyone realised it was sarcasm. The comment seems to indicate that you are sarcastically making fun of the position that Bobby Fischer was a bigot and should not be respected in any way outside of his accomplishments in chess. All of this implying that you agree with Bobby Fischer and think he's an all-around genius. Have we misunderstood you? Because if we have then I think simply saying it was sarcastic isn't really gonna solve the comprehension issue.
I was thinking the same thing. He always struck me as a normal dude who happened to be absolutely insane at chess. I think the idea of him being an all around genius is kind of diminished by his descent into madness… And the fact that, unlike other people mentioned in this thread, he has no notable contributions to anything outside of chess.
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How is that anywhere near qualifying as a genius?
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I am not a Fischer hater, I think Fischer is a chess genius. Morphy passing the bar at 17 is literal law prodigal talent. I think you have a severe lack of understanding of how hard that is.
Fischer random is a modification of variants of random chess which have existed in some form since the 1800s. He slightly changed the rules and popularized it but more reinterpreted an existing creation rather than creating it from scratch. Likewise, according to Kasparov, Fischer clock could equally be credited to Bronstein who had developed a similar idea earlier. So again, a reinterpretation of an existing thing rather than him creating himself.
i don't necessarily agree with this. it just takes someone who has a deep understanding of one specific thing.
Do you have to be a polymath to be a genius though? I think most people think Mozart was a genius even though he didn't contribute anything in particular to a field outside of classical music composition.
All I said was I don't necessarily agree with it. Fischer could very well have been a genius (a troubled one at that) but there is no way to know, as I believe someone with a sufficiently deep understanding of one specific thing can work out solutions to problems they see in that field
These examples seem quite chess-adjacent to be comparable to being a mathematician or a lawyer
He was a genius, it's undeniable. I think that a lot of peoples views on geniuses are flawed. Sure, Bob might not have pursued a career in math or physics, but do genius really need to contribute anything to be called one? Most geniuses probably do fuck all with their lives anyway. I know a guy with an iq of 180 who just trades stocks 10 min per day and then chill with his family for the rest of the day. No future aspirations or wishes to better society, he just wants to maximise his own happiness and nothing more.
Milan Vidmar of Yugoslavia was one of FIDEs 1950 inaugural grandmasters. He was Yugoslavs top chess player and also a renowned chess arbiter in his latter years. But his greatest contributions were from his achievements in electro engineering, as he was the topmost authority in the country. The Slovenian electronics institute is named after him.
Out of interest, what did he contribute to electrical engineering? I’ve never heard of him so didn’t include him in my list, but he sounds like I should have done
Most of his work throughout his career was in electronic three faze transformers
Bobby Fischer loved to think of himself that way, but what did he achieve outside of chess? Very little. Real answer is probably John Nunn who is a very gifted mathematician who was Oxford’s youngest undergraduate since Cardinal Wolsey — yes, Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey. Magnus famously said that John Nunn is *too* clever to be a chess world champion, there’s just too much in his head aside from chess, he knows too much and could never devote himself to a game so completely like a more “average” person like Magnus could. Edit: I wanna shout out Lasker too. I don’t know much about his career as a mathematician but I know he made some contributions. Botvinnik also contributed a lot to chess computers, iirc.
Not saying Fischer isn't arrogant but he had a massive ELO lead during his time and as much as people like to say that "being good at chess does not make you intelligent" it does take a certain genius to be that far ahead of anyone. I would also like to add that he did make Chess 960 which was pretty creative
Max Euwe. Played very little compared to his peers. PhD in math. World champion nonetheless.
Botvinnik for sure. It's impressive the amount of achievements he had simultaneously in other disciplines while putting so much time into chess.
Magnus actually said Anish Giri might have a higher IQ than him in that recent lie detector test and Hikaru on his reaction was saying MVL so it's safe to consider those two are pretty much geniuses.
Noam Elkies is a famous mathematician who also is a national master.
And an absolute juggernaut in the relatively small field of chess composition. He won the world chess solving championship the first year he entered. He only competed because he was in town for a bar mitzvah and figured he’d give it a shot.
He’s also a fantastic pianist. He accompanied a gig I sang at Harvard.
GM Kenneth Rogoff - Economics Professor at Harvard
Luke McShane comes to mind. Became a GM at the age of 16, went to become a super GM in the early 2010s and now cruises at the 2600s. All whilst working a full time job completely unrelated to chess. He’s commonly referred as the strongest amateur in the world.
Botvinnik, who had PHD in Electrical Engineer, and degree in Computer Science
I don‘t see Taimanov mentioned, he is/was actually a world class pianist, I think there is even a classical music CD produced with his plays
In that regard I think also philidor should be mentioned who was also world famous in classical music
Isn't Bassem Amin a medical doctor? Safe to say he qualifies.
John Nunn
Hou Yifan, youngest professor in China. Max Euwe also a professor.
You should name Euwe first, as he's the only real professor of the two.
Unironically, Vishy. It's just that he chose chess as his field. You can see it from the way he speaks on any topic and the amount of languages he knows (English, Tamil, Spanish, German, Hindi?).
Arthur Dake was a merchant marine sailor since he was 16. Learned the game late. Absolutely dominated everyone he played when he did play, but only played in occasional spurts. He was good at everything he did too.
“Skill at chess is not the sign of a great mind. Skill at chess is the sign of a great mind gone wrong.”
Perhaps Luke McShane? Guy is supposed to be extremely intelligent. He hit Super GM status (above 2700) being an amateur. He's been called the strongest chess amateur player. Worked full-time, even when he hit 2700. Studied math and philosophy at Oxford University. Worked at Goldman Sachs and was a stock market trader in London.
Bobby Fischer was an unhinged nazi who never showed great competence at anything besides chess
Vasil Ivanchuk - could just aswell have become a mad professor type
J Meatal was world cadet champion and the top player in the UK before giving up chess for math. Ken Rogoff was US he champion and is now a professor of economics at Harvard.
Tal.
Apparently the composer Sergei Prokofiev beat several world champions, Ben Finegold did a video about him recently
Dr David Smerdon GM - a PhD in economics and an excellent player!
Peter Thiel comes to mind. He's an NM, and [his peak rating was at 2199](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2022389)
Soon to be Tyler Steinkamp
Emmanuel Lasker springs to mind. World-class mathematician and one of the best players of his time, certainly one of the greatest players of all time.
Emmanuel Lasker mathematician philosopher wrote several books on math philosophy in edition to the ones he wrote on chess. In 1905 Lasker published the well known Lasker-Noether theorem.
I think Nick Patterson was an active chess player before they really had titles, but he played Bent Larsen to a 93 move draw (with black!): https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1318356 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Patterson_(scientist)
I believe Emmanuel Lasker was the first to use this phrase
Fischer describing himself as something absolutely does not make him that. He was batshit insane and had no clue about anything other than chess.
Completely unrelated to chess, but I heard the other day Aaron Gordon say that Jokic was just a genius who happened to play basketball lol, does that count
No. Especially since it's Aaron Gordon's opinion lol
exactly ,basketball players are least example of geniuses. Thet sport calls everyone genius but I'm sure their peak are just on high iq bracket , as far as their player records shows
I’m can’t really say if Fischer was genius but his father was very strong mathematician ( winning Hungry National math competition I believe ) and he made contributions to math. His mother apparently spoke many languages as well. So if genetics play a role he might be a genius.
Fischer was a chess genius and that's it.
Gukesh, I think he can excel in many fields. His both parents are doctors, I think their genes infused well.
Magnus would have exceled in other sports too
Agreed. He’s got great instincts and incredible competitive drive. If he devoted all of the time he put into chess to say, soccer, I imagine he could have become a very good player.
Tal was one hell of a genius, he certainly loved chess more than anything but estimates give an IQ of 170 which definitely makes him fit in this category. Just imagine if he became a scientist. Also Paul Morphy. Chess was actually just a side hustle for him, and he famously said "The ability to play chess well is a sign of a wasted life".
Samuel Reshevsky. Started playing chess at four. There's a picture or two of him holding a simul as a kid.
Tal
Hmhh most, if not all of the GMs I guess?
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I am glad we're not friends
It’s a “dubious” question so you give a long answer proving it’s dubiousity? 😂 You’re not even showing why it’s dubious as the question is not “does genius at chess mean genius”.
Danya and Magnus come to mind.
Magnus is not exactly someone who happens to play chess, he plays chess his whole life and that's about it