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Jonathan, David Cohen shipped me quite a few back issues of the bulletin so that I could use them as reference material in my Rating Auditor capacity.
He generously paid the shipping costs.
I merged what he sent me with my own sparse collection. I have number six but am missing about 10 issues overall between 1973 and 1995. If anyone is contemplating divesting their collection, I would like to fill in the gaps.
The issue with John Cleeve on the cover would have probably had a wider appeal. John was the president of the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association for around 25 years. The association had hundreds of members when that issue was published and the CFC might have sold a lot of single copies. Also, I don't know the year the CFC magazine went onto book shelves in some stores.
Yes, you've added some plausible scenarios: hundreds of copies might have been distributed to Correspondence players who were not full members of the CFC; John Cleeve might easily have purchased 100 copies to exchange with postal chess buddies around the world. After all, the cover price was a measly $1. Magazine store racks? No.
Incidentally, Egis, I'm not sure if you had a serious question about CFC Bulletin #6.
Let's clarify rarity of the #6 :)
Do you mean by that the office had no issues after 1 year and there was a "big" demand of it?
To me it does not look a very special issue. Why the Open table is interesting, there are no many commented games. Imho, there were better issues like specials for Canadian Closed, which must be in demand and be rare :D
The BC Flag (Main Mall and Agronomy Road) will be lowered today, Wednesday June 20, in memory of Dr. Nathan “Tuzie” Divinsky, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics (1991). Dr. Divinsky passed away in Vancouver on Sunday, June 17, 2012.
Dr. Divinsky began his career at UBC in 1949 as a professor in the department of Mathematics. During his career, he also served as Assistant Dean for the Faculty of Science.
I don't know how many would have been exchanged but I used to send a couple dozen complimentary copies of ours to editors and officials around the world. I also mailed one to anyone in Canada who showed an interest in CC to try to sell them a membership.
$1. was a lot of money when issue 6 was published. I think it might have been a years membership for the CCCA but I forget the exact amount.
I probably could have sold 50 to 100 of your magazines per issue to our members but you never asked and I didn't think of it back then. Maybe we would have got 10% and you ship it. :)
I met Nathan Divinsky once, in London in August 1986. I was invited to stay over the night of August 24 in the apartment where he and a couple(?) others were staying during the London leg of the 1986 Kasparov-Karpov match. I came from The Oval where I saw David Gower and Mike Gatting put on a double-century stand to lift England out of trouble in the 3rd Test against New Zealand, and then the next day saw Game 11, the brilliant draw played on Sunday Aug. 25th. He was really fun to talk with---I wish I remembered more specifics.
I can say a little about his mathematical work, following on from Brian Hartman and Egidijus Zeromskis and others in this thread. It is in the same line as the doctoral dissertation of Emanuel Lasker---!---whose main theorem was generalized by Emmy Noether and has a Wikipedia page all its own. The main difference is that Lasker treated commutative algebra, Divinsky non-commutative. The simplest statement I can find of Divinsky's main theorem is here.
To try to put at least Lasker's case in lay terms: Suppose you have a system of equations in the form p_1(X) = 0 ... p_m(X) = 0. If you add the equations p_i to each other, and/or multiply them by anything, you still have a valid equation. Can you get all the valid equations q that are logical consequences of yours this way? The answer is usually no, but there will always be some power q^a of q that can be combined from your p_1 ... p_m this way. This is what makes q belong to the radical of the p's. The question then becomes, how big must the power a in q^a be for certain q's, and this is where my own research starts to connect the idea that the power a may need to be humongous, to the difficulty of solving the P vs. NP Question. Divinsky's work took this from the case where X is a set of variables standing for numbers into where X stands for matrices and other math objects where XY might not equal YX. In that Star Trek world, it helped to have a student named Patrick Stewart... :D
Condolences to the family and may he rest in peace.
Last edited by Kenneth Regan; Monday, 25th June, 2012, 02:56 PM.
Reason: Fixed HTML italics
To try to put at least Lasker's case in lay terms: Suppose you have a system of equations in the form p_1(X) = 0 ... p_m(X) = 0. If you add the equations p_i to each other, and/or multiply them by anything, you still have a valid equation. Can you get all the valid equations q that are logical consequences of yours this way? The answer is usually no, but there will always be some power q^a of q that can be combined from your p_1 ... p_m this way. This is what makes q belong to the radical of the p's. The question then becomes, how big must the power a in q^a be for certain q's, and this is where my own research starts to connect the idea that the power a may need to be humongous, to the difficulty of solving the P vs. NP Question. Divinsky's work took this from the case where X is a set of variables standing for numbers into where X stands for matrices and other math objects where XY might not equal YX.
I don't think "lay terms" means what you think it means.
I think it is rather remarkable that Divinsky's work follows on from Lasker's!
Two Jewish mathematicians, separated in birth years by some 57 (1868 and 1925), working on research on different continents, who were also both strong chess players, and interested in chess for most of their lives! In Lasker's case, the word 'strong' doesn't really do him justice, as he was world champion for some 27 years. :)
I think Ken Regan did his best to make this esoteric area of advanced mathematics somewhat comprehensible for lay people, even though such a task is really impossible. I like the P vs NP analogy as to the difficulty of the problem; I have done some work on this topic myself! It is one of the so-called "Million-Dollar Problems" on offer today! I have an interesting counter-example theory for that one, which I am developing. :)
Divinsky himself said, about his work, that the future will prove its worth. I think that remains to be seen; mathematics developed at one time is often shown to be useful in applications previously unthought of, some decades later. Tensor analysis is one case; it proved to be the key to the general theory of relativity as developed by Einstein in the early 1920s, a few decades after Levi-Civita did the mathematical work.
I beleve that the Abe yanofsky chess book collection is stored in the basement at Chess and Maths i.e. strategy games, in Ottawa. They recently held a used book sale, hopefully it did not include the CFC's books. It should be possible to find a storage space for chess book collections as they do not take up that much room. Possibly I could help. However storing the books is not a long term solution. In England stately homes used to be donated to the National Trust but eventually they would only accept these homes if they were accompanied by sufficient funds to maintain them. Donating to the J.G. White collection would be a solution if they would take them.
Les Bunning
I beleve that the Abe yanofsky chess book collection is stored in the basement at Chess and Maths i.e. strategy games, in Ottawa. They recently held a used book sale, hopefully it did not include the CFC's books. It should be possible to find a storage space for chess book collections as they do not take up that much room. Possibly I could help. However storing the books is not a long term solution. In England stately homes used to be donated to the National Trust but eventually they would only accept these homes if they were accompanied by sufficient funds to maintain them. Donating to the J.G. White collection would be a solution if they would take them.
Les Bunning
Hi Les,
Actually we received the leftovers that no one else wanted. I did not see anything there from the Yanofsky collection.
I and a few friends tried a number of libraries regarding a donation of ALL or part of my collection a couple of years ago. On close questioning, they all seemed to be prepared to sell the collection OR only take a small part of it! One library was sent my "catalogue" of about 5,500 volumes (each year of a magazine = 1 volume) to review. Their response was, "We'd like these two books!" They were simple reference books.
The problem with that library was that, a) They had no space, and, b) They could not afford to maintain the collection. By maintain, I merely mean to hold it and administer it, not to add to it. I think the cost of maintaining a collection is a BIG problem for cash-strapped institutions these days.
I am now thinking that one day, I will hire some unemployed chess player to compare every one of my Canadian items to those held by the National Archives or the Québec equivalent and donate those items they do not have. For the moment though, I still hold out hope for a Canadian library that wants a superb Canadian chess collection.
BTW, I am still buying the odd Canadian chess publication I do not have. If anyone reading this has a box of old bulletins they want to sell, please do let me know. I still want to improve the Canadian collection and many of the tournament bulletins were not sent to the Archives, merely handed out at the tournaments.
Hi Ken,
I think Chess'n Math might be interested in setting up a permanent library of Canadiana chess documents, etc at our headquarters in Montreal. If it is an idea that interests you, we can certainly talk.
A large number of the used books we are selling are signed by Gerald Lowry, some are stamped Greta & Gerald Lowry, and then their Toronto address and phone number are given as well. The one I currently have beside me is also stamped July 4, 1974. It is amazing some of the things you can find in used book, things like letters, business cards... in this book there is an old phone bill from 1976. The monthly rate was $7.97 including tax.
I have come accross nothing to indicate that any of these books may be from the Yanofsky collection, but if I do I will certainly pull them off the shelf.
A large number of the used books we are selling are signed by Gerald Lowry, ...
I have come accross nothing to indicate that any of these books may be from the Yanofsky collection, but if I do I will certainly pull them off the shelf.
I don't remember any Gerald Lowry material from my tenure at the CFC office. He was a CFC rated member at the time (1976, for example).
I was imagining a chess library located in a major western Canadian city, for example, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver or Victoria. Cleveland is great, but it is in a different country. I suspect that they already have 90%+ of what we could provide them, and that most of what they're missing should probably go to Canada's National Archives and Library, if they don't already have it. Though unlikely in our economic climate, it is possible for a municipal library to have a great chess collection, for example the Salt Lake City public library.
I don't remember any Gerald Lowry material from my tenure at the CFC office. He was a CFC rated member at the time (1976, for example).
I was imagining a chess library located in a major western Canadian city, for example, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver or Victoria. Cleveland is great, but it is in a different country. I suspect that they already have 90%+ of what we could provide them, and that most of what they're missing should probably go to Canada's National Archives and Library, if they don't already have it. Though unlikely in our economic climate, it is possible for a municipal library to have a great chess collection, for example the Salt Lake City public library.
You are correct Jonathan. The Lowry books did not come from the CFC. They are a collection we picked up in Toronto about a month ago. We picked up what was left of the CFC stuff a few months ago and there was nothing from the Yanofsky collection there....it was basically stuff the CFC was not able to sell before selling their building as well as some shelving etc.
We will be picking up a 500 book collection from a chessplayer in the Toronto area in 2-3 weeks which we will be selling off in our shops no larter than early August. The large part of that collection will stay in Toronto. Lots of deals for folks. We also have a whole bunch of software that we are being deep discounted. Right now we have a box in our Montreal store. If you take 1 CD, it will cost you $15 plus tax, 2 CD's...$25 plus tax and 3 CD's...only $30 plus tax. The CD's move to Toronto on or about July 15, 2012.
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