its rank, and the curve with the highest-known exact rank (=20). Music Elkies is a bass-baritone and plays the piano for the Harvard Glee Club. Jameson N. Marvin, former director of the Glee Club, compared him to "a Bach or a Mozart," citing "[h]is gifted musicality, superior musicianship and sight-reading ability." Chess Elkies is a composer and solver of chess problems (winning the 1996 World Chess Solving Championship). One of his problems is used by the famed chess trainer Mark Dvoretsky in his book "Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual". He holds the title of National Master from the United States Chess Federation, but he no longer plays competitively. Awards and honors In 1994 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. In 2004 he received a Lester R. Ford Award and the Levi L. Conant Prize. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. References External links Personal site of Noam Elkies at Harvard University Endgame Explorations – an 11-part series of articles by Noam Elkies in Chess Horizons 1966 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Stuyvesant High School alumni Putnam Fellows Harvard Fellows Columbia College (New York) alumni Harvard University alumni Harvard University faculty Cellular automatists Chess composers International Mathematical Olympiad participants International solving grandmasters Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Mathematicians from New York (state) Number theorists