Emanuel Lasker

Born in Germany in 1868, Lasker became the second World Chess Champion in 1894 and didn't relinquish the crown until 1921. His peers accused him of deliberately playing bad moves to destabilize opponents, a "psychological" gimmick — but later analysis showed he was simply using a flexible, adaptive style decades ahead of its time. He published five chess books and magazines, though students found his methods hard to distill into lessons. Away from the board, Lasker proved theorems in commutative algebra that bear his name, wrote on bridge and Go, invented a game called Lasca, and posed a card-…