Review of Across the Board: The Mathematics of Chessboard Problems by

I think I became a mathematician because I loved to play games as a child. I learned about probability and expectation by playing games like backgammon, bridge, and Risk. But I experienced the greater thrill of careful deductive rea-soning through games like Mastermind and chess. In fact, for many years I took the game of chess quite seriously and played in many tournaments. But I gave up the game when I started college and turned my attention to more serious pursuits, like learning real mathematics. So when I first picked up a copy of Across the Board: The Mathematics of Chessboard Problems, I was pleasantly surprised. I think I expected to find mathematical analysis of questions like “How should White play to mate as quickly as possible? ” or “What sequence of moves produced this sequence of positions?”, as were effectively described in the recent Intelligencer article by Elkies and Stanley [1]. Instead, what I found was a delightfully written book on “real mathematics, ” loaded with theorems with elegant proofs, directed at problems that arise on the chessboard. Aside from knowing how each ches