Dana MacKenzie

Dana Mackenzie is a Ph.D. mathematician who went rogue and became a full-time freelance writer, specializing in popular science and mathematics. As a chess player, he was North Carolina State Champion in 1985 and 1987, is a USCF National Master an Life Master, and for several years was a popular lecturer on a chess instruction website, chesslecture.com. As a professional science writer, he wrote The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be and co-authored The Book of Why, which was named one of the top science books of 2018 by National Public Radio’s Science Friday program.

This book presents forty selected posts (many newly edited and revised) from his blog, which was named ‘Best Chess Blog of 2021’ by the Chess Journalists of America.