Karl Fabel (October 20, 1905 in

Hamburg (male), (female) en, Hamburger(s), Hamburgian(s) , timezone1 = Central (CET) , utc_offset1 = +1 , timezone1_DST = Central (CEST) , utc_offset1_DST = +2 , postal ...

– March 3, 1975 in Egenhofen) 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 retrogr ...

. Fabel received a doctorate in chemistry 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, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

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 A chess problem, also called a chess composition, is a puzzle set by the composer using chess pieces on a chess board, which presents the solver with a particular task. ...

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 p ...

Rund um das Schachbrett
by Karl Fabel - 1955

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