Karl Fabel (October 20, 1905 in

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

– March 3, 1975 in

Egenhofen Egenhofen is a municipality in the district of Fürstenfeldbruck in Bavaria in Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and t ...

) was a German

chess composer A chess composer is a person who creates endgame studies or chess problems. Chess composers usually specialize in a particular genre, e.g. endgame studies, twomovers, threemovers, moremovers, helpmates, selfmates, fairy problems, or retro ...

. Fabel received a doctorate in

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

and worked as a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and civil judge at the federal office of brands and patents in Munich, of which he was also president. He is considered one of the most ingenious chess composers and one of the fathers of

retrograde analysis In chess problems, retrograde analysis is a technique employed to determine which moves were played leading up to a given position. While this technique is rarely needed for solving ordinary chess problems, there is a whole subgenre of chess pr ...

, frequently collaborating with in this area. He composed around 1250 problems of all varieties. He studied chess problems of a mathematical nature such as the

Eight queens puzzle The eight queens puzzle is the problem of placing eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard so that no two queens threaten each other; thus, a solution requires that no two queens share the same row, column, or diagonal. There are 92 solutions. ...

, the

Knight's tour A knight's tour is a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight visits every square exactly once. If the knight ends on a square that is one knight's move from the beginning square (so that it could tour the board again im ...

and Shannon's number. He was a director of

Die Schwalbe ''Die Schwalbe'' ( English: "The Swallow") is the German chess composition society. It issues the bimonthly magazine ''Die Schwalbe''. Society ''Die Schwalbe'' was founded on 10 February 1924 in Essen as ''Vereinigung von Problemfreunden zur F ...

External links

Fabel problems
on

PDB Server This article covers computer software designed to solve, or assist people in creating or solving, chess problems – puzzles in which pieces are laid out as in a game of chess, and may at times be based upon real games of chess that have been pl ...

Rund um das Schachbrett
by Karl Fabel - 1955

(project) 1905 births 1975 deaths Chess composers 20th-century German chess players {{Germany-chess-bio-stub