Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Edward W. Formanek
American mathematician and chess player From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Edward William Formanek (born May 6, 1942)[1][2] is an American mathematician and chess player. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University,[3][4] and a FIDE International Master in chess.[1]
Mathematical career
Formanek earned his Ph.D. in 1970 from Rice University, under the supervision of Stephen M. Gersten.[5][6] He joined the Penn State faculty in 1978, and retired in 2009.[4]
In 1972, Formanek was one of two mathematicians to independently discover the central polynomials, which have applications to polynomial identity rings.[7] With Vesselin Drensky, Formanek is the author of the book Polynomial Identity Rings (Birkhäuser, 2004).[8]
In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[3][9]
Remove ads
Chess career
Formanek became a FIDE International Master in 1977.[2]
He has won the Pennsylvania State Championship five times, in 1984, 1993, 1997, 1998, and 2004.[10] However, his most famous result from this series may be in 1988, when he led the tournament going into the last round but was defeated by computer program HiTech,[11] becoming the first IM to lose a game to a computer.[12] Later the same year HiTech would also defeat grandmaster Arnold Denker.[12]
Remove ads
References
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads