About this item
Conway is a creative genius." --Martin GardnerAn unabashed original, John Horton Conway is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Richard Feynman all rolled into one--a singular mathematician, with a rock star's charisma, a sly sense of humor, a polymath's promiscuous curiosity, and a burning desire to explain everything about the world to everyone in it. Born in Liverpool in 1937, Conway found fame as a barefoot Cambridge professor. He discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry, and invented the aptly named surreal numbers, as well as the cult classic Game of Life--more than a cool fad, Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity and the game provides an analogy for all mathematics and the entire universe. Moving to Princeton in 1987, as a mathemagician he deployed cards, ropes, dice, coat hangers, and even the odd Slinky as props to extend his winning imagination and share his mathy obsessions with signature contagion.
About the Author
Siobhan Roberts is a journalist and biographer whose work focuses on mathematics and science. She was born in Belleville, Ontario, and splits her time between there, Toronto, and elsewhere (most recently Berlin, as writer-in-residence at Humboldt-Universität's Institut für Mathematik) . While writing her new book, GENIUS AT PLAY, a biography of mathematician John Horton Conway, she was a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her first book, KING OF INFINITE SPACE, won the Mathematical Association of America's 2009 Euler Prize for expanding the public's view of mathematics.
