Chess genius and otherwise complete nut-case Bobby Fischer passed away last evening. From The Associated Press:
Spokesman: Bobby Fischer Has Died
Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed by his idiosyncrasies.
You see this a lot in the truly high-end mathematicians -- the peak of their career in their late teens and early twenties and then a decline to an early death. I have always wondered about the cause of this...
