Emanuel Lasker (December 24, 1868 – January 11, 1941) was a German chess player and mathematician, born at Berlinchen in Brandenburg (now Barlinek in Poland).

Emanuel Lasker

Chess champion

In 1894 he became the second World Chess Champion by defeating Steinitz with 10 wins, 4 draws and 5 losses. He maintained this title for 27 years, the longest of all World Champions. His great tournament wins include London (1899), St Petersburg (1896 and 1914), New York (1924).

In 1921, he lost the title to Capablanca. He had already offered to resign to him a year before, but Capablanca wanted to beat Lasker in a match.

In 1933, the Jewish Lasker and his wife Martha Kohn had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. They went to England, and, after a subsequent short stay in the USSR, they settled in New York.

Lasker is noted for his "psychological" method of play, sometimes choosing a theoretically inferior move if he knew it would make his opponent uncomfortable. In one famous game against Capablanca (St. Petersburg 1914) he needed to win at all costs, and so chose a drawish opening which induced his opponent to drop his guard. Lasker won the game.

One of Lasker's most famous games is Lasker - Bauer, Amsterdam, 1889, in which he sacrificed both bishops for a forced mate in a maneuver later repeated in a number of games. His name is used in some opening variations, such as the Lasker Variation (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 Be7 5.e3 O-O 6.Nf3 h6 7.Bh4 Ne4) of the Queen's Gambit.

Mathematician

Lasker was also a distinguished mathematician. He performed his doctoral studies at Erlangen from 1900 to 1902 under David Hilbert. His doctoral thesis, Über Reihen auf der Convergenzgrenze, was published in Philosophical Transactions in 1901.

Lasker introduced the concept of a primary ideal, which extends the notion of a power of a prime number to algebraic geometry. He is most famous for his 1905 paper Zur Theorie der Moduln und Ideale, which appeared in Mathematische Annalen. In this paper, he established what is now known as the Lasker-Noether theorem for the special case of ideals in polynomial rings.

Other facets of his life

He was also a philosopher, and a good friend of Albert Einstein. Later in life he became an ardent humanitarian, and wrote passionately about the need for inspiring and structured education for the stabilization and security of mankind.

Books

• Lasker's Manual of Chess, 1947, was as famous in chess circles for its philosophical tone as for its content.

Quotations

• "Chess is a game restricted to this world, go has something extraterrestrial. If ever we find an extraterrestrial civilisation that plays a game that we also play, it will be go, without any doubt."

• "The acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either." — from Manual of Chess

Further reading

• J. Hannak, Emanuel Lasker: The Life of a Chess Master (1952, reprinted by Dover, 1991). ISBN 0486267067
• Ken Whyld, The Collected Games of Emanuel Lasker (The Chess Player, 1998)
• Twelve Great Chess Players and Their Best Games by Irving Chernev; Dover; August 1995. ISBN 0486286746

External links

• A biography of Lasker (http://www.starfireproject.com/chess/lasker.html)
• Another biography  (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Mathematicians/Lasker.html)
• Lasker's games at muljadi.org (http://www.muljadi.org/Lasker.htm)
• Analysis of Lasker's chess (http://www.angelfire.com/games4/lifemasteraj/_Lasker/lasker-list.html)