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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."
Yes, lets all hail the mathematical achievements of 'Sexconker' instead, rofl.
Ahhhh, baseless mockery. Where would the loser's ego be without it?
while developers in the US work seven days a week without vacation time. In the little over thirty years since I graduated UNC, I've only had a single contiguous week off. I manage a team of about forty architects and sixty developers, and I know none of them have had an entire week off since I got this job in 2007. We've all worked months at a time doing "hundreds" (16 hours a day weekdays plus about ten hours a day on weekends) to make a release. I need to find one of those jobs where you get paid for not working. I'm sick of this industry and how it is most economical to work developers to near death. In a normal eight hour work day, probably only a 1/3 of it can be dedicated to coding for the average dev position. If you can work a developer sixteen hours a day, then that mean instead of only being productive 2 2/3 hours (1/3 of 8) per day, you can be productive 10 2/3 hours a day. Fred Brooks figured that out over forty years ago then published The Mythical Man-Month. You can't add developers to a project to get it done faster. By forcing developers to work sixteen hour days, they have four times as much time to do coding. Yes, the pay is great, but the job takes its toil.
Yes, lets all hail the mathematical achievements of 'Sexconker' instead, rofl.
Indeed!
Did you see Sexconkers recent mathematical publication "Game Theory, Trolling and Mockery"? It's well worth a read.
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.
I came to the same conclusion about him as well after having seen him in some of the Numberphile videos on youtube.
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.
lol /.ers doing a lot of whiffing on this one. It's sad.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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".
Yes, I'm sure his genius comes from playing around all the time. From being a Cambridge student, of maths no less - the biggest group of slackers if there ever was one - to a productive professorship, a Princeton chair, and multiple fellowships. Wow, what a player.
I can either conclude that Conway has always devoted his time to work that was thoroughly enjoyable, or that news standards have degenerated considerably to appease pretentious slackers. Or both.
Coincidentally my school got a Dartmouth BASIC teletype terminal to a nearby college computer within months of The LIFE article in Scientific American. So that became my first computer project. The display was an printed array of asterisks or blanks. At 110 baud or ten characters a second I recall the display was slower than the kilo-op computer. Five years later that was our term project in the MIT Digital Computer Lab. My partner built the rule engine out of TTL gates. I built the display from timed dots on an oscilloscope. Pixel graphics were still five years in the future. TTL was so fast even then that we had slow down the system to see the output. The lab only had a limited number of $100 one-kilobyte RAM, so we had to share them among projects.
I live in Norway where we definitely work to live, not the opposite, but I did spend one year in the US back in 1991-92.
During that year I know that I worked the least number of hours of any of the engineers in my department, averaging 45 hours/week, but I still got a couple of bonuses which they really didn't need to give me, since they knew that I was going back to Oslo after 12 months.
Here in Norway we have 5 weeks of vacation time every year, and employers get in big trouble if they have any employees who don't take all of that. (You can push a maximum of two weeks in front of you from one year to the next.)
OTOH my wife would gladly confirm that I spend a lot of hours in front of my PC every day, but I consider that to be some of my hobbies, not work. :-)
I.e. stuff like NTP Hackers, Mill Computing, Lidar-based mapping work etc.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Symmetry and the Monster - Gresham College
An example of one [simple group] that was discovered using geometry is the Leech lattice. John Leech constructed a remarkable lattice in 24 dimensions. ... This lattice was absolutely brilliant. He [Leech] constructed it using Mathieu's largest group of permutations, and then he hawked this lattice around to a number of mathematicians, trying to get them to work on the symmetry group of the lattice.
John Conway took this up. Now, Conway is a big name in mathematics, but at that time he wasn't well-known. He had a wife and four children, so he was a fairly busy man. He said to his wife, 'Look, this is really exciting - I really think this lattice is worth looking into. I have to have some time on my own to do it.' So they had an agreement that he would have from Wednesday 6pm to midnight, and Saturday midday to midnight. So on the first Saturday, he got himself all set to work on this. He took an enormous sheet of paper, a great long roll of paper, and started to write down everything he knew about the Leech Lattice. He worked and worked, and after about six hours of this, he finally decided he was getting somewhere. He was quite excited, and he picked up the phone and talked to John Thompson, because Conway and Thompson were both at Cambridge University.
He [Conway] said, 'Look John, I think that the size of the group is either this number or it's half of that number.'
Thompson said, 'I will think about it and call you back.' Twenty minutes later, Thompson called back and said, 'It's half that number!'
He [Thompson?] said, 'But have you really got it?'
He [Conway] said, 'No, but I need to find one new symmetry that we don't already know about.'
So he got terribly excited and he worked, and then by about ten o'clock he phoned Thompson again, and he said, 'I've got it!'
Thompson said, 'Well, that's great.'
And he [Conway] said, 'I'm going to bed now - I'm really tired.'
Then he thought, well, it is pretty stupid to go to bed, because I haven't actually got it; I have almost got it, but not yet! So he stayed up until after midnight, and then he rang Thompson one last time and said, 'I've got it,' and the next day, they worked together on studying this fascinating group of symmetries. At any rate, it was a wonderful group of symmetries 'very important, and it contains most of the other ones that were known at that time.