Arpad Elo

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Arpad Emmerich Elo, born August 25, 1903, in Egyházaskesző, Kingdom of Hungary, was a Hungarian-American physics professor who created the Elo rating system for chess and other two-player games. He moved to the United States with his family in 1913. He earned his BSc and MSc from the University of Chicago and played chess in Chicago's league. From 1926 to 1969 he taught physics at Marquette University in Milwaukee. By the 1930s he was Milwaukee’s strongest chess player and won the Wisconsin State Championship eight times; he was the 11th person inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. He also served as president of the American Chess Federation in 1935 and 1936. Elo died of a heart attack on November 5, 1992, in Brookfield, Wisconsin.

Rating system: The idea for ratings began with Kenneth Harkness in 1950. By 1960 Elo had developed his own mathematically sound formula, and the US Chess Federation approved it that year. In 1970 FIDE adopted the Elo system for world chess ratings, and Elo himself did the calculations until the mid-1980s. Later, FIDE moved rating work to others and added rules to determine when a player can be rated, including awarding around 2200 to strong performers at events like the Chess Olympiad.