May 15, 2016
Sunday Chess Problem is taking this week off. We do have a topic for conversation, however.
Richard Weikart is an historian at California State University, Stanislaus. He has made something of a cottage industry of blaming Darwin and evolution for the ills of the world, most famously in his book…
May 13, 2016
A copy of the Japanese edition of Taking Sudoku Seriously showed up in the mail today:
Cool! The little bit of English on the cover is the only part I can understand, but it looks like they did a real good job. The diagrams all look good, at any rate.
And while I'm at it, The Mathematics of…
May 8, 2016
This week I have one more problem from Milan Vukcevich for you. This one was published in Chess Life magazine in 1986. It later won first prize in the tourney. It caught my eye when the award was published, and it was one of the problems that got me interested in composing in the first place.…
May 7, 2016
Here's a a charming story:
On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.
Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.
The…
May 2, 2016
Did you hear the one about how Charles Darwin wasn't the creator of natural selection? Did you know that other people had had the idea before him?
Oh, you did know that? Because anyone who has ever spent five minutes learning about the history of evolutionary thought knows that? Well, tell that…
May 1, 2016
It's been a busy few weeks. I hosted a Passover seder. (What? Atheists can't have seders?) Actually, I run a pretty laid back seder, all the more so this year considering there were goyim in attendance. It's mostly just a big dinner with some Hebrew and matzoh and charoset thrown in for fun.…
April 17, 2016
This week I have another problem from Milan Vukcevich for you. It was published in 1998. The position below calls for white to move and mate in five.
White has two main ideas in this position. One is to move his bishop to f4, with the plan of giving mate on d6. The other is to move his knight…
April 11, 2016
My trip to New York was a lot of fun. Some friends from Kentucky were visiting me this weekend, and that was fun too. But in all the chaos Sunday Chess Problem ended up taking the week off. Sorry about that! It will return next week.
POTW, on the other hand, is not taking the week off. Alas,…
April 4, 2016
I have just posted the penultimate POTW for the term, along with the “official” solution to last week's problem. Only one more problem after this, then it's nothing until the fall. Enjoy them while they last!
April 3, 2016
Folks, I'm back from Atlanta. This trip was the meat in a travel sandwich that started with my brief visit to Indiana two weeks ago, and ends with my trip to New York on Wednesday. (I'm speaking at The Museum of Mathematics!) Busy, busy, busy. But not too bus to serve up a Sunday Chess Problem…
March 29, 2016
I'm leaving for Atlanta tomorrow, to participate in the biennial Gathering For Gardner conference. Martin Gardner's interests were math, magic, and fighting pseudoscience. My kind of guy!
While I'm away, you can discuss Sergey Karjakin's surprise win in the big chess candidate's tournament.…
March 28, 2016
I've just posted the eighth Problem Of the Week, along with a solution to last week's problem. Only two more problems to go before we hang up our spurs until the fall.
March 27, 2016
It turns out the big Lawrence Krauss/Stephen Meyer debate is two and a half hours long. I've started watching it in installments. So far I've only gotten through Krauss' thirty minute opening presentation. I thought it was decent, though Krauss was overly nasty towards his sparring partner in…
March 27, 2016
Some chess problems are engineering marvels featuring deep and complex strategy. Other problems are elegant and delightful, and serve as reminders of just how much play can be squeezed out of a small number of pieces. This week's problem is of the latter sort. It was composed by Normal Macleod…
March 26, 2016
Reading Douglas Axe's rather simplistic musings on natural selection reminded me of one of my very favorite creationist quotes. It comes from Jonathan Sarfati, in his book Refuting Evolution 2. Sarfati is one of the more fire-breathing young-earthers. I've always had some sympathy for him, since…
March 25, 2016
When I got interested in evolution, one of the first books I read was The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. I had never heard of Dawkins before reading that book. I read it simply because I happened to notice it a the public library and thought it had a cool cover.
The book's third chapter is…
March 21, 2016
The seventh POTW has been posted. Enjoy!
While at the Indiana math conference, I had the pleasure of seeing a short magic show by Caleb Wiles, who lives in Indianapolis and was apparently a math major at one time. I was impressed! It turns out he will at some point be appearing on Penn and…
March 20, 2016
The big Go match came to an exciting conclusion. The computer won the first three (out of five) games, thereby winning the match, against Go world champion Lee Sedol. In the press conference after the third game the tenor was that it was impressive that Sedol was able to compete as strongly as he…
March 14, 2016
Spring break has ended. It is a great sadness. But that means that POTW can now return! Life is full of tradeoffs.
March 10, 2016
For the chess fans, the big candidates tournament begins in Moscow tomorrow. Eight of the top players in the world will be competing for the chance to face Magnus Carlsen in a match for the title. As it happens, the US has two representatives: Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. Going strictly…
March 7, 2016
Periodically some social scientist notices that math is abstract and difficult. Thinking that math educators have overlooked this fact, he breathlessly reports his findings as a great discovery he has made.
The latest example is Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queen's College. In a new…
March 6, 2016
One of the pleasures of playing in the US Amateur Team East is getting to browse the offerings from Fred Wilson's chess store. I've acquired a number of choice books from him over the years, especially in the area of chess composition. This year I was able to snatch up a copy of The Two-Move…
February 22, 2016
Writing at The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin provides some helpful pushback against the nauseating wave of Scalia hagiography:
Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant,…
February 21, 2016
It's hard to believe it's been a year since the last one of these epic posts. But it's time once more to report on the goings-on at the US Amateur Team East chess tournament. I don't play a lot of tournament chess anymore, but I always like to come out of retirement for this one. With something…
February 20, 2016
Over at Uncommon Descent, Granville Sewell has popped up one more time to write the same post he always writes. It's the one about how the second law of thermodynamics totally refutes evolution. It's a worth a look, since he is even more explicit than usual that there is nothing more to his…
February 17, 2016
I spent this weekend playing in the annual chess extravaganza known as the US Amateur Team East (epic blog post to follow). On Saturday night, I was having dinner at an excellent Japanese restaurant with some of my teammates. One of them, who happens to be a lawyer, had his phone out and said, “…
February 17, 2016
It went up a little late this week, because of my recent travels, but we do have a new Problem of the Week. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
February 12, 2016
I'm about to leave town for the weekend, but I did want to poke my head up just long enough to wish everyone a Happy Darwin Day! And just in time for this most wonderful of holidays, my paper on anti-evolutionary mathematics has now been published. In the journal Science and Education, to be…
February 1, 2016
The second Problem Of The Week has now been posted, along with an official solution to the first problem. Enjoy!
January 31, 2016
Helpmates occupy a curious position in the world of chess problems. On the one hand, they seem to be the most popular form nowadays for composers. There are just so many possibilities for original content, especially when fairy pieces or conditions are added to the mix. On the other hand, they…
