Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-76052-0335,_Schacholympiade,_Tal_(UdSSR)_gegen_Fischer_(USA).jpg: Kohls, Ulrich derivative work: Karpouzi · CC BY-SA 3.0

Became the youngest U.S. chess champion at 14 and, in 1972, ended a quarter-century of Soviet dominance of the world championship by defeating Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, a match followed around the world as a proxy for the Cold War. He walked away from the title in 1975 rather than accept new match conditions and largely vanished from public life, resurfacing in 1992 for an unofficial rematch that violated U.S. sanctions and left him living as a fugitive abroad. In his later decades he made repeated antisemitic statements and denied the Holocaust, despite his own Jewish ancestry — a fact his admirers and biographers have had to reckon with rather than explain away.