Consistent Moderation and of course Complaints

[Paul McKeown]

You should have seen what Botvinnik thought of the Grandmaster title, given it was intended to indicate that the player was (or had been) a credible contender for the World Championship. Never mind what he thought of the International Master title. I might dig up the reference some time.

[Paul McKeown]

Probably the only organisation with more Grandmasters than FIDÉ is the Orange Lodge

[TomChivers]

So, I looked up the number of Nobel Prize winners. There have been 865. If we add to that the Fields Medalists, of which there have been 49, that's still a bit under the number of GMs alive today. Of course not all of the 865 will have been academics, especially in Peace and Literature. This suggests the GM title in chess is moderately less elite than a Nobel Prize in academia.

[Paul McKeown]

But let's not forget that the grandmasters are competing in only one field - playing! The academics are involved in lots of different disciplines.

[Matthew Turner]

I remember that one of my tutors missed out of the Nobel prize because he was a complete alcoholic and might discredit the award. If chess had such exacting standards it might be considerably more difficult to get the GM title

[John Upham]

I was lucky enough to conduct research at The University of Sussex with the 1996 Nobel prize winner for Chemistry, Professior Harold W. Kroto, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Kroto he of C60 (or Buckminsterfullerene) fame. Also in his team was Dr. Jonathan P. Hare http://www.creative-science.org.uk/jph.html who appeared many times on television as a wonderful populariser of science.

I witnessed the C60 story unfold in real time and it was probably the most exciting time of my scientific career.

My DPhil (1991) title evolved to be

"Monte Carlo Simulation of Cluster Ion Peak Shapes"