As a junior, he showed a prodigious talent for chess and in 1967, at 12 years of age, he won the British under-14 Championship.

[4] Graduating in 1973, he went on to gain a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978 with a thesis on finite H-spaces, supervised by John Hubbuck.

In 1989, he finished sixth in the inaugural 'World Cup', a series of tournaments in which the top 25 players in the world competed.

His best performance in the World Chess Championship cycle came in 1987, when he lost a playoff match against Lajos Portisch for a place in the Candidates Tournament.

At the prestigious Hoogovens tournament (held annually in Wijk aan Zee) he was a winner in 1982, 1990 and 1991.

Six years earlier, in January 1989, his then rating of 2620 was high enough to elevate him into the world's top ten, where he shared ninth place.

His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.Nunn is also involved with chess problems, composing several examples and solving as part of the British team on several occasions.

[12] He is the third person ever to gain both over-the-board and solving GM titles (the others being Jonathan Mestel and Ram Soffer; Bojan Vučković has been the fourth since 2008).

Nunn is married to Petra Fink-Nunn, a German chess player with the title Woman FIDE Master.