There are a chessplayer Colonel Moreau and a French officer Moreau, and one question is whether both men are the same person. This question is considered in detail by J.Spinrad in his articles, and he suggests that the answer is in the affirmative, but he notes that this is not a proven fact. (Only btw, the current version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charle... states with references to the same articles that Spinrad identified both men as the same.)

Our biography respects the situation in some sense by the formulation "Believed to be...". However, since Spinrad himself reports on some non-believers, I don't like this phrase. Moreover, the date of birth of the chessplayer is already that of the French officer.

The French officer did also some mathematics, but in our biography he is "an internationally respected mathematician", which is in fact a quote from the first of Spinrad's articles. I know that Spinrad is an international respected mathematician is his field, but he did not prove that Moreau was, simply because all of the mathematical sources are French!

Finally, the second sentence from our biography: "He was invited to the 1903 Monte Carlo tournament as a last-minute replacement for Mikhail Chigorin ...". This is simply wrong!

Spinrad discussed this point and proved that Moreau's participation was planned already in 1902. Moreover, Spinrad writes: "Furthermore, other sources have named Wolf, not Moreau, as the substitute for Chigorin." I can easily provide one such source: Emil Kemeny's tournament book, which appeared only a few months after the tournament as "The American Chess Weekly, Special Series No. 1" has a chapter on page 2 entitled "Tschigorin Not Permitted To Participate". There it is clearly stated with a lot of details that Wolf was admitted to play instead of Chigorin.

I can but hope he took the losses with equal parts humor and stoic hardening of resolve. Clearly he never lost heart, and kept competing despite it all.

How many of us know players that will withdraw from a tournament at the slightest prompting, citing lame reasons when so often it is just cowardice and the fear of enduring further humiliation that causes them to quit.

Source: "Deutsche Schachzeitung", July 1903, page 227. No joke.

<SteinitzLives> I know what you mean: the history is full of withdrawels of players who had bad results. But the meaning of bad results depends on the player's expectation.

Described by Sherlock Holmes as "The second most dangerous man in London" [after Moriatry].

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebast...>

For the record, wiki never states that Moreau was a <internationally respected mathematician>, so they aren't doing the adducing.

Your criticism must therefore be directly at the bio.

Putting that aside, I wonder what prompted the qualifier <provincial>, that you used?

There are only two journals referenced by wiki:

<Nouvelles Annales de Mathematiques>

and

<Archiv der Mathematik und Physik>

It appears that the French journal was second tier, but that's no shame, given it was against Liouville's 1st tier

<Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journ...

Note also that the two math journals actually had a respected working relation with each other. Also, <Nouvelles Annales ...> was international in this respect - many foreign articles would be republished in it (sometimes edited - see ref at very bottom.)

As for the other journal:

<Johann August Grunert and his Archiv der Mathematik und Physik as an integrative factor of everyone’s mathematics in the middle of the nineteenth century>

https://www.researchgate.net/public...

On the other hand, I did find this:

<Except in a few cases, the many famous mathematicians of the nineteenth century did not publish in Grunert's Archiv. ... One of the few contributors of the journal who has remained well known today, was Oscar Xaver Schlömilch.>

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/...

Max Abraham, physicist, also published in <Archiv...>:

<Today Max Abraham is known mainly for his achievements in the field of electrodynamics and, in particular, for the successful series of textbooks associated with his name. He is, however, largely forgotten as a pioneer of a relativistic theory of gravitation [through his failed efforts]. >

http://download.springer.com/static...

Still, though not being journals that a mathematician at the level of a Legrendre, Laplace, Lagrange, or Louiville would use, I still don't see how these journals were exactly provincial. I'm not a historian of scientific journals of the 1800's, admittedly, but I did take a few moments to consider and research the issue.

* * * * *

For a detailed characterization of <Nouvelles Annales ...>

see section 30 from the ref wiki provided:

Clever boy.

<Putting that aside, I wonder what prompted the qualifier <provincial>, that you used?>

I'm wondering about the name signature mentioned in Winter's CN #4574

<It was mentioned in A Chess Omnibus that the list of subscribers to Reinfeld’s 1935 book on Cambridge Springs, 1904 included

<‘C. Moreau’>,

and here we add that our copy of Reinfeld’s book Thirty-five Nimzowitsch Games, 1904-1927 (New York, 1935) contained, handwritten, the subscriber’s name,

<C.A. Moreau>:

<<>>>

How to resolve the A. in the C.A.?

http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/...

Doesn't seem to match anywhere in

<Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau>.

Follow the link above to see the signature, or look here:

Hard to live that one down.

<<>>>

How to resolve the A. in the C.A.? . . .

Doesn't seem to match anywhere in

<Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau>.>