50 Years of Chess: Transition

In the spring of 1983 I earned my doctorate from Princeton University, and after a somewhat nail-biting job search I landed a one-year position in the math department at Duke University. After a year it turned into a tenure-track position, and I ended up staying at...

50 Years of Chess: Year 12

By the end of 1982, it was starting to look as if my two-year sabbatical to focus on math instead of chess had been a good decision — not only for my math dissertation, but also for my chess game! My rating was up to 1989, the closest I had ever been to the...

50 Years of Chess: Year 7 (Part 3)

In my last post I wrote about the semester I spent in Russia in the winter of 1978. Even the people who lived in Leningrad said it was an brutally cold December. I experienced -25 degrees Fahrenheit (-32 degrees Celsius) for the first time in my life, and farther...