Who was Lyudmila Rudenko? Google Doodle honours champion chess player on her 114th birthday
For all her success in the sport, it was an incident in WWII that the Ukrainian considered her proudest achievement
LYUDMILA Rudenko was a trailblazing chess player who, for all her success in the sport, considered her exploits in World War Two to be her proudest achievement.
Google is commemorating the Grandmaster on what would have been her 114th birthday with a stylish Doodle – here is her story.
Who was Lyudmila Rudenko?
Lyudmila Rudenko was born in Lubny, Ukraine – then part of the Russian Empire – on July 27 1904.
Although she was more interested in swimming as a child, her dad taught her to play chess at the age of 10.
She began playing the sport competitively at tournaments when she moved to Moscow in 1925, winning the capital's women's championship three years later.
Rudenko married her scientist husband Lev Davidovich Goldstein after moving to Leningrad, and they had a son in 1931.
It was there that she began training under master chess player Peter Romanovsky, and took the Leningrad women's championship on three occasions.
During the second world war, Rudenko organised a train to evacuate children from the Siege of Leningrad, one of the conflict's most destructive and harrowing engagements.
Despite all of her success in chess, it was this which Rudenko considered the crowning achievement of her life.
In 1950, she became the second woman ever to win the Woman's World Chess Championship, holding the title until 1953.
Rudenko was named an International Master of chess in 1950, and a Woman Grandmaster in 1976, with her exploits paving the way for women to come.
LATEST GOOGLE DOODLES
What is a Google Doodle?
In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second 'o' of Google as a message to that they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.
The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.
In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the 'o's for Halloween the following year.
Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.
Among the Doodles published in past months were designs commemorating German scientist Robert Koch, Jan Ingenhousz (who discovered photosynthesis) and the 50th anniversary of kids coding languages being introduced.
And the search giant celebrated the 2017 Autumn Equinox , which marked the official ending of summer and the coming of autumn.