About
I'm Raphael, a chess player since I was a little child, at national level. That's how I came to a chess startup, and it's my main job.
Raphael Nitsche · LinkedIn
Chess and teaching
I build Lotus Chess with my brother: a chess learning app, like Duolingo but just for chess, with 500k+ users. I love teaching.
How mhtirogla started
- Teaching chess. Lotus Chess teaches chess to players at every level.
- Building the app. Behind a learning app sit many technical systems, not just screens.
- Hard parts. Chess engines, game servers and the systems around them each bring their own hard problems.
- Combining many architectures. To solve them we combined many architectures, algorithms and data structures.
- mhtirogla. The idea for this tool came out of that work: the building blocks and the way to combine them, for any system.
Timeline
- 2013–2017 Co-founded Math 42 with my family: a computer algebra system that solves students' math problems step by step
- 2017–2019 Math 42 acquired by Chegg Inc., the Santa Clara-based education company; continued there
- 2022–2024 Studied theoretical mathematics, with a focus on machine learning
- 2025–now Lotus Chess with my brother: a chess learning app with 500k+ users
Vision
Once all technical knowledge in the world is structured as dependency graphs, every problem starts from everything already known: you, or your AI, see which building blocks it needs, what each one depends on, and which proven work to combine, instead of starting from zero.
A hub of knowledge dependency graphs for every domain where knowledge depends on other knowledge: each idea linked to what it builds on and what builds on it, so problems get solved more efficiently.
- Algorithms and systems
- Mathematics
- Mathematical papers
- Materials science
- Medicine
mhtirogla is a project of Lotus Chess UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Berlin.