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Conway is a creative genius." --Martin Gardner
An 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. He is a jet-setting ambassador-at-large for the beauties of all things mathematical.
Genius At Play is an intimate investigation into the mind of an endearing genius, laying bare Conway's personal and professional idiosyncrasies. The intimacy comes courtesy of the man himself. He generously granted Roberts full access, though not without the occasional grudge and grumble: "Oh hell," he'd say. "You're not going to put that in the book. Are you?!?
- Sales Rank: #351723 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-07-14
- Released on: 2015-07-14
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Genius At Play is a portrait of one creative genius by another. Absolutely brilliant. Impossible to put down." ―Sylvia Nasar, author of A BEAUTIFUL MIND and GRAND PURSUIT
"A triumph." ―Graham Farmelo, author of THE STRANGEST MAN
"John Horton Conway [is] perhaps the greatest living genius unknown to the general public." ―starred review, Publishers Weekly
"Roberts's new biography of Conway demonstrates how the man's playfulness and originality has fed into the creativity and intelligence of his ideas." ―Scientific American
"A delightful meta-biography--playful indeed--of a brilliant iconoclast." ―James Gleick, author of THE INFORMATION and CHAOS
"Genius At Play is noteworthy for many reasons, among them the non-negligible fact of being a biography of a living subject--a task generally self-defeating . . . and rarely approached with as much tenacious graciousness as Roberts’s. [A] tremendous read in its totality." ―Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
"Conway [is] himself such an unusual and special mathematician, deserving of the thoughtful account Ms. Roberts gives of his life and of his mind." ―The Wall Street Journal
"A fascinating read from start to finish . . . never gets bogged down in mathematical detail, yet it conveys much of the unstoppable excitement of its hero in full throttle. Roberts has already won kudos for her book on geometer Donald Coxeter, and this volume serves to cement her position as a top mathematical biographer." ―Huffington Post
"Roberts is ingenious . . . in bringing this unpredictable, impossibly brilliant mathematician to life in this vivid and intimate portrayal." ―The New York Times Numberplay blog
"Wonderfully written, fascinating and hilarious, the book is a delight from beginning to end. Roberts has produced a playful and captivating portrait of the most playful mathematician alive." ―Alex Bellos, author of HERE'S LOOKING AT EUCLID and THE GRAPES OF MATH
"John Conway is, by any standards, a very remarkable man, and he well deserves a remarkable biography, which this book undoubtedly is. Siobhan Roberts . . . expertly conjures up a genuine picture of the man and his amazing world." ―Roger Penrose, author of THE ROAD TO REALITY and THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND
"In this engrossing biography, readers see this genius repeatedly turn perplexities into breakthroughs . . . [Conway’s] personality that emerges from this freewheeling narrative responds to even deep confusion with an irresistible playfulness." ―starred review, Booklist
"[An] entertaining portrait of a charismatic genius." ―Kirkus Reviews
"It’s a riveting read, and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy it." ―Baron Martin Rees of Ludlow, UK Astronomer Royal and author of JUST SIX NUMBERS
"One of the oddest, most enticing biographies . . . . The biography of someone who is just a figment of the imagination--but what an imagination--that of John Horton Conway himself." ―Literary Review of Canada
"Unflinchingly honest yet entertaining and lively." ―Physics World
About the Author
Siobhan Roberts is a science writer and winner of four National Magazine Awards. While writing Genius At Play 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. Her first book, King of Infinite Space, won the Mathematical Association of America’s Euler Prize for expanding the public’s view of mathematics. She lives in Toronto.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating biography.
By Philippe Sosoe
Conway is a highly unusual mathematician. Correspondingly, this excellent book offers an unusual combination of biographical narrative, elements of insight into Conway's mathematics, and stories from several years the author spent interviewing Conway while researching this book.
I was especially impressed with the way the mathematics was seamlessly integrated into the text. There is just enough precision to satisfy those with more technical interests, while remaining of interest to those who have no inclination to understand the details, and merely want a glimpse of Conway's insane genius.
36 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
DO NOT BUY THE KINDLE VERSION
By Older Mom
I downloaded this book in mid-July, 2015, shortly after it was released on Kindle. Amazon should be ashamed of the formatting. The book has challenges, which I will write about when I am done, but no challenge could be more insurmountable than the lousy formatting job Amazon has done with this book. The author frequently quotes the subject without quotation marks. Sometimes these quotes are buried in with the main text of the book; sometimes they are in indented in smaller fonts; sometimes they just spring up like new paragraphs without any introduction; all of which means working through this book is like dissection. Buy a hard copy of the book or send Amazon a message that you insist that they have a human being edit their Kindle version before springing it on an unsuspecting population.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating biography of a stellar mathematician
By JohnVidale
Fascinating biography of a stellar mathematician. He's infinitely talented, but seriously unbalanced. The book presents an affectionate but serious look at his career, strange habits, and obsessions, replete with quotes from the subject and entertaining opinions on being chronicled. It's more like a conversation than a novel.
Wives, heart attacks, professional jealousy, poor eating habits, strange ways to motivate himself to research and prepare for lectures, the prose is straightforward and moderately unsparing.
As the one-star rating guy already said, the Kindle version loses the formatting that says whether the writer or Conway himself is talking, and about 1/4 of the book is quotes. One can more or less figure it out, but it's a nuisance. That's why this rating is not 5 stars.
There's maybe 1/4 of the book that is math and games, which I found more inscrutable and less amusing than the rest, despite being a scientist, although that seems par for the course in biographies of science. I picked this up because of a thorough review that I saw in Nature - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v523/n7561/full/523406a.html
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