The Rube Goldberg Machine That Mastered Keynesian Economics

While researching my soon-to-be-released biography on John Horton Conway, an iconoclastic and very influential mathematician at Princeton, I organized a research trip to his native England. We visited with Conway’s elder sister, Joan, in Liverpool, and convened a reunion at his alma mater, Cambridge. We met there with a few of his “sum chums,” his co-authors on an authoritative “atlas” of all the existent terrain, all the knowledge, about “finite simple groups,” in the field of group theory, the mathematical study of symmetry. Invariably, we’d arrive at the next destination on the itinerary, whereupon Conway would confusedly proclaim:

I’m not quite sure WHY I’m here. What am I doing?

One such destination was a classroom, the Meade Room (after the economist James Meade), at Cambridge’s faculty of economics. Not long before our departure to Cambridge, Conway had