Barden on Chess
Leonard Barden
Saturday January 6, 2007
The Guardian
David Howell became the UK’s youngest ever grandmaster in Stockholm yesterday where he tied for second prize with 7/9 in the traditional Rilton Cup.
The Sussex 16-year-old already had two of the three required GM results, while his new 2501 world rating completes the requirements. At 16 years one month Howell breaks Luke McShane’s UK age record set in 2000 by around six months.
Before that our youngest GM was Michael Adams, now the world No9, who did it at 17. Howell is among the 20 all-time youngest GMs, though his contemporaries Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin are far ahead and approaching the elite GM 2700 level.
Here is the full article. 
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
The push to become a great GM and push the rating into 2700 and who is ‘doing it faster’ is very subjective. I remember Howell.
Howell may have made more friends, learned some mathematics, physics, etc, and re-evaluated, much like McShane (and Waitzkin, come to think of it). Life is not chess. The re-evaluation using such a great mind may lead to more opportunities than chess can provide.
Just a thought. These are great minds, regardless.
~Dale
Yeah.
He said to love chemistry and biology a lot .
Hopefully ,he is going to study these sciences in a future.
There are other,more important things in life,beside 64 black-white squares.
Was this picture of him taken at one of the first Saturday tournaments in Budapest? The board and pieces look familiar.
Henry
Agree with the other posts that hope that if he doesn’t pursue chess uses his obvious talents to pursue some other intellectual field. Rather than more GMs the long term future of chess maybe in having people who are prominent in other fields who can later become patrons of the game.
Is his father the famous golfer?
He is of about the same biological age (stage of a puberty) as Negi,and about same 2500 ELO rating.
If everything works ok,he should break 2700 ELO mark one day.