![]() He is perhaps most famous for inventing the Game of Life in the late 1960s. From there Conway, borrowing some Shakespeare, addresses a familiar visitor with his Liverpudlian lilt:Ĭonway’s contributions to the mathematical canon include innumerable games. With a querying student often at his side, Conway settles either on a cluster of couches in the main room or a window alcove just outside the fray in the hallway, furnished with two armchairs facing a blackboard - a very edifying nook. Inside, the professor-to-undergrad ratio is nearly 1-to-1. The department is housed in the 13-story Fine Hall, the tallest tower in Princeton, with Sprint and AT&T cell towers on the rooftop. Conway can usually be found loitering in the mathematics department’s third-floor common room. By contrast, Conway is rumpled, with an otherworldly mien, somewhere between The Hobbit’s Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf. It’s a milieu where the well-groomed preppy aesthetic never seems passé. The campus buildings are Gothic and festooned with ivy. The hoity-toity Princeton bubble seems like an incongruously grand home base for someone so gamesome. You can’t put him in a mathematical box.” And the thing about John is he’ll think about anything.… He has a real sense of whimsy. “The word ‘genius’ gets misused an awful lot,” said Persi Diaconis, a mathematician at Stanford University. Yet he is Princeton’s John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). Instead, he purports to have frittered away reams and reams of time playing. Based at Princeton University, though he found fame at Cambridge (as a student and professor from 1957 to 1987), Conway, 77, claims never to have worked a day in his life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |