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Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway Hardcover – July 14, 2015

by Siobhan Roberts (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 165 ratings
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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?!?"

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  1. Print length
    480 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Bloomsbury USA
  4. Publication date
    July 14, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    6.47 x 1.48 x 9.46 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1620405938
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1620405932
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“John Horton Conway [is] perhaps the greatest living genius unknown to the general public.” ―starred review, Publishers Weekly

“Science journalist Roberts's new biography of Conway demonstrates how the man's playfulness and originality has fed into the creativity and intelligence of his ideas. The tome resonates with Conway's voice--which gets its own special font--and his discussions with the author dictate the story's structure and provide the narrative's best glimpses into how his mind darts and weaves.” ―Scientific American

“Part of what makes Genius At Play so engaging is her detailed account of her experience and impressions as Mr. Conway, over eight years, recounted the many stories that make up his life.” ―The New York Times Numberplay blog

“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

“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

“Genius At Play gives us as much insight into the calculus of Conway's creative powers as we are capable of capturing with our limited powers.” ―Buffalo News

“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 delightful meta-biography--playful indeed--of a brilliant iconoclast.” ―James Gleick, author of The Information and Chaos

“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

“John Conway is, by any standards, a very remarkable man, and he well deserves a remarkable biography, which this book undoubtedly is. Siobhan Roberts gives us an intimate picture of this brilliant and eccentric mathematician, with an extraordinary facility to entertain and educate through puzzles and unusual ideas. Through frequent use of quotations and anecdotes, she 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

“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

About the Author

Siobhan Roberts is a journalist, and won a National Magazine Award for her profile of Donald Coxeter in Toronto, and this is her first book.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury USA; First Edition (July 14, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1620405938
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1620405932
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.69 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.48 x 9.46 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 165 ratings

About the author

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Siobhan Roberts

Siobhan Roberts

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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.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
We don’t use a simple average to calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star. Our system gives more weight to certain factors—including how recent the review is and if the reviewer bought it on Amazon. Learn more
165 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jonathan
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely brilliant
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2015
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One of the greatest paramillenial minds is described in incredible depth. Those things I have any ability to verify are correct, everything else sounds like your typical English eccentric genius, scaled up as you would expect. The mathematics was in the correct proportion to how he thought and lived. Yes, how an eccentric lives matters, as that both makes and breaks them. The maths is covered elsewhere. How he thinks isn't subject-specific but it is the bit that lets someone examine their subject of choice. His thinking is crinkly, perfect for new connections.

So, a great book about a great subject.
3 people found this helpful
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John Vidale
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating biography of a stellar mathematician
Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2015
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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
14 people found this helpful
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Dr. Ron Knott
5.0 out of 5 stars A good read
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2016
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A good biography that gives a good idea of his somewhat chaotic lifestyle. It has some details and background to Conway's maths and games. It is a good read especially if you know of his surreal numbers and his Numbers and Games books but it did not help me understand those books any better! A fascinating insight into Conway's life and work nevertheless.
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Grant Cairns
3.0 out of 5 stars Both fascinating and disappointing
Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2017
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Conway is certainly one of the heroes of modern mathematics. His ingenious creations are so imaginative, and his talks and written works have inspired and delighted so many people. The nice thing about this book is that one can hear Conway’s voice clearly in it. The author conducted numerous interviews with Conway, and the book contains lots of direct quotes. As a result the book is quite fascinating. It is a tribute to Conway that he has allowed this frank, and at times unflattering exposition of his life and views. On the negative side, the book is rather shambolic; Conway’s life was notoriously chaotic, and perhaps the author consciously tried to reflect this disorganisation in the book (?). It didn’t upset me unduly, but the reader shouldn’t expect a carefully detailed work. The most disappointing aspect is the mathematics. Repeatedly throughout the book Conway’s mathematical ideas are presented without reflection or clarification. The impression one gets, for better or worse, is that the author understood precious little of the material she transcribed. The overall result is rather depressing: why is it that an award winning author, who won the Euler prize for "expanding the public’s view of mathematics", didn’t bother to make the effort to better engage with the work she relates? A sad comment on how mathematics is perceived, even by those sympathetic to it.
25 people found this helpful
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Kenneth A. Perko, Jr.
5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Book
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2015
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A great book with just a few minor flaws. The unknotted knot on page 30 is the figure eight, not the trefoil, and the fact that Conway's published list of 11-crossing knots omits four prime examples is beyond debate [cf. Note 30 on page 425]. Conway may well have discovered them as a teenager, but Alain Caudron was the first to write them down [STRUCTURATION DE LA CLASSIFICATION DES NOEUDS ET DES ENLACEMENTS, Notes de recherche 1976/77/78, E.N.S.E.T. de Tunis (1979), page 74]. See also MR 81k:57005.
Also, the Kinoshita/Terasaka knot was discovered in 1957 (a decade before publication of Conway's second example with trivial Alexander polynomial) and it's the one on the right. Conway speaks only "from my point of view" when he says on page 32 "there is really no difference between these 2 knots." Robert Riley distinguished them in Homomorphisms of Knot Groups on Finite Groups. Mathematics of Computation 25 (1971), page 615. As Conway modestly explains in Note 31 on page 425: "It's very, very difficult to get ahold of why one knot is different from another one. The notation I invented made it a bit easier. It hasn't solved the problem completely -- not all knots are good enough to have a notation in my system, and I don't know what to do when they are not."
12 people found this helpful
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J. Lenchner
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Romp through the Life of a Renowned Mathematician
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2017
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The most thoroughly intriguing biography of a mathematician I have ever read. You not only get caught up in the wonderful romp of Conway's life, and his crazy escapades, but you are treated to largely understandable morsels of his mathematics, from his proof of Morley's Trisector Theorem, to combinatorial game theory and the surreal numbers, to his wok on the Monster simple group. Granted the discussion of the latter is not all that understandable, but you take solace in the fact that it is not completely understandable even by Conway. Many, many more mathematical tidbits are thrown in, in between. If you are a mathematically curious person you will surely get caught up in one or another of these problems, like I did with the 3n+1 problem. You will probably also try to add some of the Conway tricks to your own repertoire. Beware though that the heads/tails mind reading trick via penny balancing does not seem to work as well with other currencies.
4 people found this helpful
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Dave Hein
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. Wish I read it in print.
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2015
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The book is excellent. If you have any interest in Conway or what the life of a mathematician might be like, I recommend reading it.

But the formatting for Kindle is disappointing. It is clear that the printed text makes use of a different font and formatting for anything spoken by Conway, but that is lost in the Kindle format. You'll have to infer that Conway is 'speaking' from the context.
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doug hone
5.0 out of 5 stars An Examined Mind
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2023
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The headline for this review is a reference to Socrates and is my way of recommending this book is a buy. I would recommend this book as a buy just for the uniquely helpful Einstein quote alone. I liked that the author was a tremendous guide helping John H. Conway skillfully tell his story. Based on this book I look forward to reading Siobhan's Donald Coxeter book.
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Jan Krabbenbos
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius for life
Reviewed in the Netherlands on December 3, 2016
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Very nice read about the life and mind of John Horton Conway. Not so much the game of life, but his mathematical thinking and his life so-far.
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Dr. Richard Pennington
5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of an eccentric mathematical genius.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2016
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I knew John conway when he was teaching in Cambridge (UK). Always eccentric (he was the only person I knew who wore sandals when there was snow on the ground), but an outright genius, he was also very entertaining. The book does not disappoint.
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Dr. T.
5.0 out of 5 stars Auf Reisen mit dem ungewöhnlichen John H. Conway ' ein Road Book
Reviewed in Germany on September 28, 2015
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John Horton Conway ist sicher einer der ungewöhnlichsten Mathematiker der Gegenwart, der bis 1986 in Cambridge arbeitete, seither ist er John .von Neumann Professor an der Universität Princeton. Seine bedeutendsten Resultat erzielte er auf dem Gebiet der Klassifizierungen einfacher endlicher Gruppen, er entdeckte drei neue riesige sporadische Gruppen, die später nach ihm benannt wurden. Er war Mitinitiator des ATLAS endlicher einfacher Gruppen. 1979/80 beschrieb er gemeinsam mit Simon P. Norton eine mysteriösen Zusammenhang der Dimensionen von Darstellungen der Monster Gruppe mit modularen Funktionen.

Auch unter Berücksichtigung der Besonderheiten der Mathematiker Gemeinde, darf man Conway durchaus als exzentrisch bezeichnen, er hatte die Gewohnheit, sommers wie winters barfuß oder lediglich mit Sandalen an der Füßen über den Campus in Cambridge zu wandeln; Skurrilitäten kennzeichnen aber auch sein mathematisches Schaffen. Conway leistete Beiträge auf vielen unterschiedlichen Gebieten, und entwickelte auch eine Leidenschaft für Spiele und deren Theorie; der breiten Öffentlichkeit ist er wahrscheinlich vor allem durch 'Life' bekannt, einem Nullpersonen 'Spiel', das auf einem extrem einfachen zellulären Automaten beruht, trotz allem aber eine faszinieren Formenvielfalt hervorbringen kann, deswegen wurde es z.B. von Sun als Bildschirmschoner für ihr SunOS verwendet. Conway liebt es auch seine Fähigkeiten, den Wochentag jedes beliebigen Datums im Kopf zu berechnen, unter Beweis zu stellen, er entwickelte dazu sogar ein Computerprogramm, das zehn zufälliges Daten auswählt und für die Conway die Wochentage berechnet.

Shiobhan Roberts traf John Conway bereits im Alter von 16 zum ersten Mal in einem kanadisch- amerikanischen mathematischen Sommer Camp, für die Conway gern Vorträge hielt, oder vielleicht besser mathematische Events veranstaltete. Ihr Plan zu diesem Buch, reifte kurz nach der Fertigstellung ihrer Coxeter Biographie; Conway lehnte zunächst ab, konnte dann aber wohl der Versuchung nicht widerstehen, seine viele skurrilen Geschichten erzählen zu können.

Die Autorin ist Wissenschafts- Journalistin, lebt in Toronto und hat sich auf mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Themen spezialisiert, neben ihren Biographien, hat sie zahlreichen Beiträgen für New York Times, Boston Globe, Toronto Star und National Post, verfasst.

Für ihr aktuelles Buch führte die Autorin mit Conway zahlreiche Interviews und Gespräche mit Conway, seinen Familienangehörigen, Freunden und Kollegen, während ihrer Recherchen war sie Gast des Direktors des Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), und begleitete Conway auch auf seinen Vortragsreisen, darunter zum Kavli Institut in Japan ' eine Arbeit, die sie insgesamt sechs Jahre in Anspruch nahm.

Die Erzählungen folgenden im Groben der Chronologie, ordnen sich dieser aber nicht pedantisch unter, Conways Werdegang als Mathematiker, seine bahnbrechenden Resultate, werden genauso behandelt, wie die Stationen seines Leben, seine Attitüden als Lehrer und die zahlreichen 'Tricks' mit denen er immer wieder die Hörer seiner Vorträge und Vorlesungen unterhält und verblüfft. Das alles ist in intelligenter Weise mit den vielen Geschichten und Anekdoten von und über Conway verflochten, dabei kommt der Protagonist auch immer wieder selbst zu Wort. Diese Kombination macht die Biographie zu einer unterhaltenden, spannenden und oft amüsanten Lektüre.

Bereits im College entwarf Conway ein Modell eines binären 'Computers', dessen Bits durch gefüllte oder leere Wasserbecher repräsentiert wurden, bereits hier zeigten sich seine Fähigkeiten, Dinge auf ihr einfachstes Wesen reduzieren zu können.

Sein PhD Thema erhielt Conway von Harold Davenport, er kam damit auch gut voran, da die Arbeit aber kein neue Ansätze enthielt, veröffentlichte er sie nie und wandte sich der der Theorie der transfiniten Zahlen von G. Cantor zu und promovierte schließlich 1964 über 'Homogenous ordered sets'.

John McKay veranlasste Conway über die Symmetrien das sogenannte Leech Gitters nachzudenken; dem gelang es in einer einzigen Nacht die Details dieser riesigen Gruppe auszuarbeiten, der größten der drei später nach Conway benannten sporadischen einfache Gruppen. Ihre Entdeckung markiert auch Conways wissenschaftlichen Durchbruch.

Dieser Erfolg brachten Coway die Freiheit, sich fortan nur noch mit Themen zu beschäftigen, die in interessieren., darunter auch Sachen, die auf den ersten Blick elementar erscheinen ' wie etwa die seltsame Hofstadter- Conway Folge. Bei seinen scheinbar ziellosen 'Experimenten' findet Conway immer wieder überraschende und wunderschöne Resultate ' es wird eine regelrechtes Prinzip: wo andere längst aufgegeben hätten, macht Conway noch mindesten vier Schritte weiter... Einer der 'golden nuggets', die er dabei schürft, sind die Surrealen Zahlen, einem Konstrukt von verblüffender Einfachheit und Eleganz, das in gewisser Weise das Prinzip der Dedekindschen Schnitte, zur Konstruktion reeller Zahlen, bis zum Extrem verallgemeinert; diese Zahlenklasse vereint reelle mit Ordinalzahlen und umfasst auch infinitesimale und unendlich große Elemente. Der Name 'Surreal Numbers' wurde von Donald Knuth geprägt, der einen brillanten mathematischen Essay darüber verfasste.

Das Buch ist keine wissenschaftliche Biographie, und will das sicher auch nicht sein, dafür gelingt es der Autorin auf einfühlsame Art und Weise die vielfältigen Fassetten, die das Leben und Wirken von John Conway prägen, zu folgen, sie folgt ihm dabei nicht nur auf wirklichen Reisen, sondern auch in sein faszinierende Ideen Welten ' das Buch kann also vielleicht am ehesten als Road Book (denn ein Video ist es ja nicht) gesehen werden.

Abgerundet wird das schön gestaltete Werk, von mehreren Anhängen mit mathematischen Details , sowie Bibliographien der Arbeiten Conways und einer zweiten mit den Werken anderer, und schließlich einem Abschnitt mit Anmerkungen zum Text; schön wäre auch noch eine Zeittafel gewesen.

Wer sich intensiver mit den Ideen Conways beschäftigen möchte, sei auch auf seine Bücher 'On Numbers and Games' und 'The Book of Numbers' (gemeinsam mit R. Guy) verwiesen, die zum guten Teil mit wenigen mathematischen Vorkenntnissen verständlich sind.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2017
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Not very biographical or mathematical but still worth the read..
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