Martin Fierz
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Martin Fierz (born in 1971) is an aerosol professor and a chess player. He is the inventor of the diffusion size classifier.[1].
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[edit] Early life
Martin Fierz learned how to play chess when he was about five years old. About five years later, he joined a chess club. Fierz was fascinated with spaceships when he saw the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which inspired him to become an engineer.
Fierz became so interested in chess that he attempted to write a chess program, but failed. After several failed attempts, he decided to give up programming chess and try programming Connect Four instead. He decided to make a Connect Four program and compete it against his physics student, Andri Schaufelbühl who is also making a Connect Four program, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. As he felt more comfortable in making a chess program, he tried but again failed. Therefore, he thought of making a checkers program, which he got the idea from reading Time magazines about Marion Tinsley, a checkers player competing against Chinook, a checkers program. Also, he found out that programming checkers is not as complex as programming chess. Then he became very successful for programming CheckerBoard, the de facto English draughts program.
Currently, his interests are playing chess, climb mountains, and programming his checkers program, CheckerBoard.
[edit] Chess career
Fierz played Swiss Chess Championship in Pontresina. He wrote Muse, a chess program.
[edit] Physics
Fierz was a PhD professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and wrote a thesis on Ultrafast electron dynamics in gas-suspended nanoparticles. In 2001, he moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, and working with a physics professor Klaus Sattler (who also moved to Hawaii from Zürich, Switzerland) at the University of Hawaii. In late 2002, he got homesick and moved back to Zürich, Switzerland. He is now working on the measurement of aerosols in the air to measure air pollution.
[edit] Fierz in court
Living in Switzerland, the Swiss army was attempting to put Fierz in prison. Fierz did not want to go to the army because he thinks that it is "useless and stupid" [1]. He found out there is a unit looking for physicists and decided to go there. However, his attorney already decided on Fierz the day before he go to court, so he was never put in prison.
