Mate in two

‘Lipton’s writing is characterised by its rigour, and though his working through of alternative hypotheses can be demanding for the reader, his positions are always stated with great clarity’. That line is taken from an obituary of Michael Lipton, published in the Financial Times, who died in April at the age of 86. Lipton was a development economist whose early work was based upon a close observation of farming techniques of the rural poor. Rather disarmingly, the CV on his website attributed his education to ‘the people of Kavathe village, Satara district, Maharashtra, India 1965-66’ right after Haberdashers’ School, Balliol College, Oxford and MIT.

But Lipton was also a prolific and accomplished composer of chess problems, and a former president of the British Chess Problem Society (BCPS). The July issue of The Problemist, the BCPS magazine, carries two articles in tribute, and one cannot help noticing that ‘rigour and alternative hypotheses’, central to Lipton’s academic work, are also prominent in his elegant compositions.