John Nunn

John Nunn
John Nunn in 2010
Full name	John Denis Martin Nunn
Country	England
Born	(1955-04-25) 25 April 1955 (age 61) London
Title	Grandmaster (1978) International Solving Grandmaster (2004)
World Champion	Problem Solving 2004, 2007, 2010
FIDE rating	2600 (February 2017)
Peak rating	2630 (January 1995)
Peak ranking	No. 9 (January 1985)

John Denis Martin Nunn (born 25 April 1955 in London) is an English chess grandmaster, a three-time world champion in chess problem solving, a chess writer and publisher, and a mathematician. He is one of England's strongest chess players and once was in the world's top ten.

As a junior, he showed a prodigious talent for the game and in 1967, at twelve years of age, he won the British under-14 Championship. At fourteen, he was London Under-18 Champion for the 1969/70 season and less than a year later, at just fifteen years of age, he proceeded to Oriel College, Oxford, to study mathematics. At the time, he was Oxford's youngest undergraduate since Cardinal Wolsey in 1520. Graduating in 1973, he went on to gain his doctorate in 1978 with a thesis on finite H-spaces (titled "Some Problems in Algebraic Topology"), and remained at Oxford University as a mathematics lecturer until 1981, when he became a professional chess player.

In 1975, he became the European Junior Champion. He gained the Grandmaster title in 1978 and was British champion in 1980. Nunn has twice won individual gold medals at Chess Olympiads. In 1989, he finished sixth in the inaugural 'World Cup', a series of tournaments in which the top 25 players in the world competed. His best performance in the World Chess Championship cycle came in 1987, when he lost a playoff match against Lajos Portisch for a place in the Candidates Tournament. He won the prestigious Hoogovens tournament (held annually in Wijk aan Zee) in 1982, 1990 and 1991.