If you have a few chess sets at home, try the following exercise: Arrange eight queens on a board so that none of them are attacking each other. If you succeed once, can you find a second arrangement?

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

A popular chess problem known as the Queen’s Puzzle has captivated mathematicians and computer scientists for years, yet no one has been able to write a computer program that can solve the conundrum ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. If this use of chess to represent life feels familiar, it is largely thanks to the medieval world. As I argue in my book “Power ...