John Conway: All Play and No Work For a Genius

An anonymous reader points out Quanta's spotlight piece on mathematician John Conway, whose best known mathematical contribution is probably his "Game of Life," which has inspired many a screensaver and more than a few computer science careers. From the article: Based at Princeton University, though he found fame at Cambridge (as a student and professor from 1957 to 1987), John Horton Conway, 77, claims never to have worked a day in his life. Instead, he purports to have frittered away reams and reams of time playing. Yet he is Princeton's John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). He's a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is roundly praised as a genius. "The word 'genius' gets misused an awful lot," said Persi Diaconis, a mathematician at Stanford University. "John Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he'll think about anything. He has a real sense of whimsy. You can't put him in a mathematical box."

Comments

Re:"The word 'genius' gets misused an awful lot,"

[khallow]

He'll, of course, be most well known for his celebrated surgery theory on sexifolds, particularly the foundational Sexconker Decomposition Theorem which demonstrates that all sexifolds can be decomposed into basic topological components such as penisifolds, breastifolds, and analfolds. And if the sexifold is not oriented, then it has a peculiar bisexual structure.

Re:My first grade school computer program in 1970

[Tokolosh]

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."