Slashdot Mirror
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."
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, that's an illegal working environment.
Conway was my supervisor at Cambridge in the late '60s. I can still recall his telling me about the Game of Life and the estimate that $1million of computer time had been wasted the previous year "playing" it.
He also pointed out the multiplication table of his group: a fanfold listing that reached around the four walls of his office. When I expressed the thought that it looked a little small for so large a group he exclaimed "oh, well each symbol stands for a 100x100 matrix".
As for surreal numbers.....
I have always said he is probably the only genius I have ever met.
Having said which, he was a LOUSY teacher, because he could never understand why anyone found anything (mathematical) difficult: "just think of a determinant as a volume transform from one vector space to another".