Emanuel Lasker was an influential twentieth century German mathematician known for being a distinguished chess player and a philosopher. He maintained his title of World Chess Champion for three decades. His opponents believed that he employed a psychological approach to playing chess. He would deliberately make bad moves as to confound the players. He published books and magazines on the subject of chess. Being a research mathematics, he explored the field of commutative algebra which became the ultimate contribution of his to mathematics. As far as philosophical endeavors are concerned, he can’t make much progress in writing philosophical work.
Emanuel Lasker was born on December 24, 1868 at Berlinchen in Neumark, Poland to a Jewish family. He was taught chess by his brother Berthold when he was sent to Berlin to study. Berthold was deemed one of the top ten chess players in the world in the late nineteenth century. Despite the fact that chess dominated Lasker’s life, it was not the only thing he was drawn to. His parents recognized his intellectual aptitude and inclination toward mathematics. So when he turned eleven his parents sent him off to Berlin to study mathematics. After attaining his abitur from Landsberg an der Warthe, he opted to study philosophy and mathematics from Göttingen and Heidelberg universities.
Tow of mathematical articles of Lasker were published in Nature, in 1895. Upon advice of his doctoral advisor, David Hilbert, he got enrolled at Erlangen in 1900. He presented his dissertation in 1901 that was titled Über Reihen auf der Convergenzgrenze which translates as “On Series at Convergence Boundaries”. Following its acceptance by Erlangen, Royal Society had it published. The following year he was conferred upon a doctorate in mathematics. In 1905, he published a mathematical article on theorem which is now considered of radical importance in modern algebra.
Upon completion of his doctorate studies, Lasker moved to United States of America. He was appointed at Tulane University in New Orleans as a mathematics lecturer for on short-term position. Subsequently, he joined Victoria University in Manchester in 1901, but once again he was not offered a long-term position. Besides teaching, he also tried his hand at writing as he produced a booklet called, Kampf. It was an attempt at generalizing all competitive activities, such as chess, war, business etc, in the form of a theory. His philosophical works include Das Begreifen der Welt (1913) and Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar (1918) which are translated as Comprehending the World and The Philosophy of the Unattainable, respectively.
Moreover, he wrote a book on chess which was the collection of his lectures on chess, titled Common Sense in Chess. He launched a magazine named Lasker’s Chess, in 1904 which lasted for half a decade. In 1911, in his early 40s he married a rich widow, Martha Cohn, who was a year older to him. His wife was a fiction writer who wrote famous stories using a pseudonym, L. Marco. Lasker made a terrible investment decision during the First World War as he invested all his life savings, hoping to make it double through German War Bonds. Unfortunate for him, he lost all his investment since Germany lost the war. He penned a book during the war expressing his opinion that civilization will suffer severely if Germany is to lose the war which it did.