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Kenneth Harkness (byname of Stanley Edgar; Chess Life, March 5, 1955, page 4"Shady Side: The Life and Crimes of Norman Tweed Whitaker, Chess Master", p. 232, November 12, 1896 – October 4, 1972) was a chess organizer. He is the creator of the Harkness rating system.
He had lived in Boca Raton, Florida. He became an International Arbiter in 1972. He was a member of the FIDE Permanent Rules Commission.
Harkness was responsible for introducing Swiss system tournaments to the United States, and also introduced the Harkness rating system, which was a precursor to the Elo rating system. One method of tiebreaks in Swiss system tournaments is named after him. In the Harkness Method, players tied on points are ranked by the sum of their opponents' scores discarding the top score and the bottom score. For his services, Harkness is in the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame.
With Irving Chernev, Harkness co-wrote An Invitation to Chess. He was responsible for a number of the first American chess rulebooks.
Harkness died on a train in Yugoslavia, on his way to Skopje to be an arbiter at the Chess Olympiad.
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