Tom's Blog on Life

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
Aesop – Author (620 – 560 BC)

He was standing against a wall in Odessa, in the terror of 1918, with a firing squad lined up in front of him and rifles already raised. His only crime was his profession. And then a Bolshevik officer walked over, looked at the list of names, stopped at one — and asked him a single, strange question that would save his life. It had nothing to do with banking, or politics, or the revolution. It was about a game…

His name was Ossip Bernstein.

He was born on September 20, 1882, in Zhytomyr, in the Russian Empire, into a well-off Jewish family. He was the kind of man who could command any room he entered — not with force, but with the sheer power of his mind. As a young man studying in Germany, he earned a doctorate in law by his mid-twenties, and became a successful financial lawyer, advising banks and businesses. He married, raised a family, and built real wealth.

But alongside the law, Ossip had another gift that would define his life. He was a brilliant chess player.

By the early 1900s, he was one of the finest players in all of Europe — ranked among the top handful in the world, trading victories with legends of the game, tying for first at major international tournaments. He had one of those rare minds that could see ten moves ahead, hold a whole battlefield of possibilities in his head at once, and stay ice-cold under pressure. He was, in every sense, a man of standing.

And that, in 1918, was enough to nearly get him killed.

The Russian Revolution had torn through the empire. The old order was being dismantled overnight — the banks seized, the wealthy hunted, and anyone tied to the old financial world branded an enemy of the new state. Ossip was working in Odessa as a legal adviser to bankers. That was his entire crime. Not violence. Not sabotage. Just his job.

The Cheka — the Bolshevik secret police, feared across Russia during the bloody period known as the Red Terror — arrested him. There was no trial. No courtroom. No lawyer, no appeal. A minor official simply ordered him shot, and had Bernstein and a group of other prisoners lined up against a wall to be executed.

And here is the moment that has echoed through chess history ever since.

As the firing squad stood ready, a superior officer arrived and asked to see the list of prisoners’ names. He ran his eye down the page — and stopped. One name jumped out at him. He knew it. Not from any government file or banking ledger, but from the newspapers, from the tournament results he’d followed for years. He was a chess enthusiast. And the name in front of him belonged to one of the most famous chess masters in Europe.

He looked up. “Are you the chess master? The famous Bernstein?”

Ossip — thirty-six years old, his back to the wall, rifles pointed at his chest — said that he was.

But the officer wasn’t satisfied with a simple yes. Anyone could claim a name to save his skin. If this man truly was the great Bernstein, he would have to prove it — over the board. So the officer sat him down and made him play a game of chess, right then and there, with his life hanging on the result.

Imagine it. After hours of waiting to die, the terror still coursing through him, Ossip Bernstein had to summon the finest chess of his life — on command, with everything he had left riding on every move.

He won. In short order.

There was no longer any doubt who this man was. Convinced, the officer had Bernstein taken back to prison rather than shot — and from there, Ossip managed to escape the country entirely, fleeing to France. A game he’d first learned as a boy had just bought him his life.

But here is what makes his story almost beyond belief. Surviving that wall was only the first catastrophe he would overcome.

In France, he rebuilt everything from scratch — a new career, a new fortune. And then, in the Great Depression around 1929, it was all wiped out again. So he started over a second time, in his late forties.

Then, in 1940, Nazi Germany invaded France. Bernstein was Jewish, and he could not stay. So the family fled once more, this time toward Spain — reportedly hiding in caves by day to avoid the border patrols, Ossip suffering a heart attack from the strain of the escape. He lost his fortune a third time, and settled, with nothing but his name and his mind, in Barcelona.

Three times, life stripped him of everything he had. Three times, he built it all back.

And through all of it — the firing squad, two world wars, three ruined fortunes — the chess never stopped.

In 1950, when the world chess federation created its official titles, Ossip Bernstein was named one of the very first International Grandmasters in history.

And then came his most delicious triumph of all. In 1954, at the age of seventy-two, he traveled to a major tournament in Montevideo. One of his opponents was a much younger grandmaster named Miguel Najdorf, who was so insulted at having to play a man in his seventies — and so certain he’d crush the old man easily — that he actually persuaded the organizers to double the first-place prize money, confident he’d be the one to pocket it.

Bernstein sat down across the board from him and dismantled him in thirty-seven moves. The game was so beautiful it won the tournament’s Brilliancy Prize.

The young man had laughed. The old man had simply played.

On November 30, 1962, Ossip Bernstein died at the age of eighty, in the quiet of the French Pyrenees. And there is one final, fitting detail: he had been on his way back toward Russia to play in a chess tournament — returning, after all those decades of exile, toward the country that had once stood him against a wall — when his heart gave out. Chess was with him, quite literally, to the very end.

He had survived a firing squad, two world wars, and three lost fortunes. He had been branded an enemy, hunted, exiled, and ruined, again and again — and he had refused, every single time, to be erased.

What saved him in that Odessa yard was not luck, and it was not mercy. It was a lifetime of sitting across the board from opponents who wanted to break him — and never, ever letting them.

Locked alone in a solitary confinement cell, a man serving a long sentence for murder passed the endless hours with sudoku puzzles — until the day he noticed another inmate handing out little envelopes full of math problems. He asked for one. He solved it. He asked for another. And what happened next, from inside a prison cell with nothing but a pencil and paper, would astonish mathematicians on the other side of the world…

His name is Christopher Havens.

Let's be honest about how his story begins, because it matters. In 2010, Havens took a man's life in a drug-related shooting. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in a Washington state prison. He was in his late twenties, his life in ruins, and he struggled badly in his early days behind bars. After an altercation with another inmate, he was thrown into solitary confinement for about a year.

And it was there, in that isolation, that something completely unexpected happened.

To pass the crushing hours, Havens started doing sudoku. Then he noticed a fellow inmate passing around small envelopes stuffed with math problems, and asked if he could have one. He worked it out. Then he asked for another. And another.

Something about mathematics — its logic, its order, its quiet, unshakable truth — connected with Christopher Havens in a way that nothing in his life ever had before. He hadn't been a math student. He'd never chased the subject. But now, alone in a cell, it found him. And he threw himself into it completely, studying, by his own account, as much as ten hours a day.

He devoured every math book the prison library had — and then he ran out. So in 2013, Havens did something audacious. He sat down and wrote a letter to an academic mathematics publisher, asking how he might subscribe to a research journal, and whether any mathematician in the world would be willing to correspond with a prisoner about advanced mathematics.

Most letters like that go straight into the wastebasket. But this one found its way to a number theorist named Umberto Cerruti, a professor at the University of Torino in Italy.

Professor Cerruti was skeptical, to put it mildly. He assumed Havens was probably a “crank” — one of the many amateurs who fall in love with numbers and convince themselves they've discovered something. So, to test him, Cerruti mailed him a difficult problem to solve.

What came back in the mail stopped him cold.

Havens mailed back a strip of paper nearly four feet long — about 120 centimeters — covered in one single, enormous, handwritten formula. Cerruti, half-expecting nonsense, carefully typed the whole thing into his computer to check it. And to his astonishment, it was correct. Completely correct.

This was no crank. This was a genuine mathematical mind — one that had taught itself, alone, in a prison cell.

From that moment, a remarkable transatlantic collaboration was born, conducted entirely through handwritten letters crossing the ocean. Cerruti began sending Havens real material in number theory — one of the oldest branches of mathematics, with roots going back more than two thousand years to the ancient Greek Euclid. And here is the part that makes it truly extraordinary: the work was never dumbed down for him. Havens was handed genuine, unsolved research problems — the kind that challenge trained, professional mathematicians — and he worked through them with nothing but a pencil, paper, and the prison mail. No computer. No classroom. No professor down the hall.

The obstacles were constant. When Cerruti tried to send him math books, the prison blocked them, until Havens negotiated with the administration to let them through. With no computer to typeset his work, he taught himself LaTeX — the intricate coding language mathematicians use to format equations — entirely by hand, visualizing every symbol in his head and mailing pages of handwritten code to his collaborators.

And then, in January 2020, it happened. Christopher Havens published his first paper in a real, peer-reviewed academic journal, Research in Number Theory, as a co-author alongside professional mathematicians. His work revealed, for the first time, certain hidden regularities in the way a vast class of numbers can be approximated — a genuine, original contribution to human knowledge, produced from a prison cell.

And he didn't stop. More publications followed — work tied to a conference in Slovakia, several more academic papers, and even a 2025 textbook on continued fractions from a respected academic publisher. Havens has never set foot in Italy or Slovakia, the countries his collaborators call home. All of it was done by mail, by hand, from inside.

But here is the part that may matter most of all.

Christopher Havens didn't keep his second chance to himself. Realizing what mathematics had done for him, he began — informally, in 2016 — offering to teach math to his fellow inmates, in exchange for a little library access and meeting space. That small effort grew into something real: the Prison Mathematics Project, which he co-founded and which became an official nonprofit in 2020.

Today, that project connects incarcerated students all across the country with volunteer mathematicians and educators who mentor them by mail. In 2025 alone, it reported more than 350 active mentorship pairings nationwide. It runs “Math Circles” — group problem-solving sessions — inside correctional facilities in several states. Havens has even held a part-time university research position, working on problems connected to cryptography.

He has described his own goal for his years in prison simply: that he wants to come out the other side as a functioning, contributing member of society. And he has thrown himself into mentoring other incarcerated students, calling that work central to their rehabilitation — and to his own.

None of this erases what Christopher Havens did. A man died, and that fact remains. But his story is a powerful reminder of something we too easily forget: that a human being is never only the worst thing they've ever done. That the mind is capable of astonishing things, in the most unlikely of places. And that even in a locked cell, with nothing but a pencil and the will to try, a person can begin to rebuild — and even give something back to the world.

Some prisons hold the body. But it turns out there are some things — curiosity, discipline, the hunger to become better — that no wall can ever quite contain.