stone free or die: An <affine connection> by <Mr. Saunders>, wonder how he found it in such an obscure math reference.For the non-mathematicians, I've extracted the chess bits, with a little sprinkling of some Erdös:
<6 Envoi
Let me indulge in a few personal reminiscences, especially to bring out more about Rich Laver. A long, long time ago, I was an aspiring teenage chess master in the local San Francisco chess scene. It was a time fraught with excitement and inventiveness, as well as encounters with eclectic, quirky personalities. In one tournament, I had a gangly opponent who came to the table with shirt untucked and opened 1.g4, yet I still managed to lose. He let on that he was a graduate student in mathematics, which mystified me at the time (what’s new in subtraction?). During my Caltech years, I got wind that Rich Laver was on the UC Berkeley team that won the national collegiate chess championship that year. I eventually saw a 1968 game he lost to grandmaster Pal Benko when the latter was trotting out his gambit, a game later anthologized in [9]. A mutual chess buddy mentioned that Laver had told Laver and set theory him that his thesis result could be explained to a horse—only years later did I take in that he had solved Fraïssé’s Conjecture
[...]
By then at Boulder, Rich would gently suggest going mountain climbing, but I would hint at a constitutional reluctance. He did mention how he was a member of a party that took Paul Erdös up a Flatiron (mountain) near Boulder and how Erdös came in his usual light beige clothes and sandals. In truth, our paths rarely crossed as I remained on the East Coast. Through the 1980s Rich would occasionally send me preprints, sometimes with pencil scribblings. One time, he sent me his early thinking about embeddings of rank into rank. Regrettably, I did not follow up.
The decades went by with our correspondence turning more and more to chess, especially fanciful problems and extraordinary grandmaster games. In a final email to me, which I can now time as well after the onset of Parkinson’s, Rich posed the following chess problem: Start with the initial position and play a sequence of legal moves until Black plays 5 ... N×R mate. I eventually figured out that the White king would have to be at f2, and so sent him: 1. f3, Nf6 2. Kf2, Nh5 3. d3, Ng3 4. Be3, a6 5. Qe1, N × R mate. But then, Rich wrote back, now do it with an intervening check! This new problem kicked around in my mental attic for over a year, and one bright day I saw: 1. f3, Nf6 2. e4, N×e4 3. Qe2, Ng3 4. Q×e7ch, Q×Qch 5. Kf2, N×R mate. But by then it was too late to write him.>
(ibid) https://math.bu.edu/people/aki/25+....
PS - I think even the non-expert should have a passing acquaintance with such a colorful, flavorful character as Erdös.
Kibitzing
