Sylvester and Chess

 

James Joseph Sylvester. Credit: Wikipedia.

It is interesting to note that the famed mathematician Sylvester (1814-1897) was, first, Jewish, and - what is less known - a chess fan. We read in Eric Temple Bell's article, "Invariant Twins, Cayley and Sylvester" (The World of Mathematics, by James R. Newman (ed.), New York, Simon & Schuster: 1956, vol. 1, pp. 341-365), we read:

After his retirement from Woolwich Sylvester lived in London, versifying, reading the classics, playing chess, and enjoying himself generally, but not doing much mathematics.

Bell's comment does not imply Sylvester was a strong player, but at least it is known publicly that he played chess. Does anybody know more about this? It should be noted that a quick internet search found Sylvester's own address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1869) noting:

a very clever writer in a recent magazine article, expresses his doubts whether it is, in itself, a more serious pursuit, or more worthy of interesting an intellectual human being, than the study of chess problems or Chinese puzzles.

The rest of the lecture shows that Sylvester, unsurprisingly, consider mathematics much more important - as his audience also undoubtably did - but it is not clear whether he expects them to consider chess problems unimportant.