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    Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway
    Unavailable
    Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway
    Unavailable
    Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway
    Ebook640 pages9 hours

    Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway

    By Siobhan Roberts

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2017 JPBM Communications Award for Expository and Popular Books.
    “A delightful meta-biography--playful indeed--of a brilliant iconoclast.” --James Gleick, author of The Information

    John Horton Conway is a singular mathematician with a lovely loopy brain. He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Richard Feynman all rolled into one--he boasts a rock star's charisma, a slyly bent sense of humor, a polymath's promiscuous curiosity, and an insatiable compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it. At Cambridge, Conway wrestled with "Monstrous Moonshine," discovered the aptly named surreal numbers, and invented the cult classic Game of Life--more than just a cool fad, Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity and provides an analogy for mathematics and the entire universe. As a "mathemagician" at Princeton, he used ropes, dice, pennies, coat hangers, even the occasional Slinky, as props to extend his winning imagination and share his many nerdish delights. He granted Roberts full access to his idiosyncrasies and intellect both, though not without the occasional grumble: "Oh hell," he'd say. "You're not going to put that in the book. Are you?!?"
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJul 14, 2015
    ISBN9781620405949
    Unavailable
    Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway
    Author

    Siobhan Roberts

    Siobhan Roberts is a science writer and winner of four National Magazine Awards. While writing this book, 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, Canada.

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    • 3/5
      Didn't care for it. The structure of the writing and narrative was convoluted at best. Too many side tangents, comments from Conway. Picked it up several times at different points, hoping for some improvement, but didn't really find it. Had to stop reading it.