Arpad Elo: Creator of Chess Rating System
Arpad Emmerich Elo (August 25, 1903 – November 5, 1992) was a Hungarian-American physics professor who created the Elo rating system for two-player games such as chess. His formula became the standard for measuring player strength across competitive chess worldwide.
Early Life and Education
Elo was born in Egyházaskesző, Kingdom of Hungary, and moved to the United States with his parents in 1913. He obtained his BSc degree in 1925 and his MSc degree in 1928 from the University of Chicago, where he also played chess in the Chicago Chess League.
Career and Achievements
From 1926 until his retirement in 1969, Elo served as a physics instructor at Marquette University in Milwaukee. By the 1930s, he was the strongest chess player in Milwaukee, at the time one of the nation’s leading chess cities. He won the Wisconsin State Championship eight times and was the 11th person inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. He served as president of the American Chess Federation (predecessor of United States Chess Federation) for terms in 1935 and 1936.
The original player rating system was developed in 1950 by Kenneth Harkness, the Business Manager of the United States Chess Federation. By 1960, using data from the Harkness Rating System, Elo developed his own formula with a sound statistical basis that improved upon the earlier system. The new rating system was approved at a meeting of the United States Chess Federation in St. Louis in 1960.
In 1970, FIDE, the World Chess Federation, agreed to adopt the Elo Rating System. From then until the mid-1980s, Elo himself made the rating calculations. At the time, the computational task was relatively straightforward because fewer than 2,000 players were rated by FIDE. FIDE later reassigned the task of managing and computing the ratings to others, excluding Elo.
Additional Resources
Elo published The Rating of Chess Players, Past and Present in a first edition in 1978 and a second edition in 1986.
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