Ed Northam

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Edward (Ed) Stafford Northam, (October 18, 1927 - March 13, 2010) was an American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and chess player. He earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics and M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Michigan State University in 1953. He was professor for Mathematics and CS at the University of Maine from 1964 until his retirement in 1991.

=Chess= Ed Northam was an avid chess player, competing in tournaments in the 1950s and 1960s and conducting research into chess game variants including Chess960 where he created new methods that can be used by players to determine the starting positions of their pieces. He also enjoyed the game of Go. His colleagues in computer chess included Hans Berliner and Danny Kopec. All three were involved in producing a taxonomy of concepts for evaluating chess strength, resulting from Advances in Computer Chess 6 conference held in August 1990.

=Selected Publications=
 * Edward Stafford Northam (1953). Topology in lattices. Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science. Department of Mathematics
 * Danny Kopec, Ed Northam, David Podber, Yehya Fouda (1989). The Role of Connectivity in Chess. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search, pdf
 * Hans Berliner, Danny Kopec, Ed Northam (1991). A taxonomy of concepts for evaluating chess strength: examples from two difficult categories. Advances in Computer Chess 6, pdf

=External Links=
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Edward Northam
 * In Memory of Edward S. Northam 1927-2010
 * The United States Chess Federation - Edward S. Northam by Phillip R Smith, April 28, 2010

=References= Up one level