Bobby Fischer, the ultimate enigmatic genius in a world of enigmatic geniuses, died today in Iceland (of all places). I wonder if he picked up the language while he was there. I did not realize that he was a fringe evangelical Christian and a public antisemite -- railing about the international Jewish conspiracies on Philippine radio. However, an apparent old schoolmate hints at Fischer's insightfulness: "But Fischer’s argument was that the old ideas [obsolete chess strategies] were not necessarily bad ideas,†Mr. Pandolfini said. “They had merely fallen out of favor, and by injecting new thinking into an old idea, you created state-of-the-art logic." I like that.
