Portrait Of A Mathematician And His Three-Dimensional Chessboard

PORTRAIT OF A MATHEMATICIAN AND HIS THREE-DIMENSIONAL CHESSBOARD

TIME Magazine
Aug 21 2014

An Army combat photographer during World War II, Yale Joel joined the
staff at LIFE in 1947, where he made a name for himself as the guy
whose great strength was the impossible or tricky shot using unusual
(and often self-invented) equipment. In a 1993 interview with John
Loengard, the Bronx-born technical wizard explained how the memorable
portrait above came about:

I found a small item in the New York Times about a Hungarian, Dr.

Ervand Kogbetliantz. He had designed a three-dimensional chessboard
and was looking for someone to play with him. I called him up and
invited him to come down to the LIFE studio. . . . I spent the morning
shooting pictures of him, using heavy-duty strobes to get enough light
so that I could get a close-up of the chessmen in the foreground and
the doctor in the rear.

[In a 1973 article on chess innovations, TIME magazine referred to Dr.

Kogbetliantz as “Russian-born,” while Wikipedia locates his birthplace
in Armenia.–Ed.]

Asked if Kogbetliantz’s game, played on an eight-tiered board with
64 pieces to a side, really worked, Joel replied:

It only worked for Dr. Kogbetliantz because he could never find anyone
to play with him. He had a very astute mind mathematically. He looked
at these strobe units as I kept drawing them closer to his ears, and
he finally came up with a mathematical computation. He announced as
I made the last adjustments, “If you bring those lights any closer
than they are now, you’re going to blow my brains out.”