Genius At Play

Starred review from May 4, 2015
Science writer Roberts (Wind Wizard) delivers a delightful, if scattershot, biography of flamboyant mathematician John Horton Conway (b. 1937), perhaps the greatest living genius unknown to the general public. Roberts first met Conway while researching The King of Infinite Space, her first book—a biography of mathematician Donald Coxeter. Egotistical yet charming, Conway leads
a relentlessly disorderly existence and keeps no archives, so Roberts resorts to a mixture of oral history and journalism when telling his story, but few readers will complain. His fascination with games, numbers, knots, and words is
positively childlike, and it has won him fame within his profession as well as among mathematically inclined laymen, including the late Martin Gardner. Conway invented the iconic “Game of Life” in 1970, a demonstration of how a basic pattern following simple rules will, over time, generate amazing complexity—offering clues to the origins of life itself. He also asserts that he has proved the existence of free will. Although Roberts tries to maintain
chronology, the book overflows with digressions, anecdotes, interviews with colleagues, and monologues from her
subject. Only the mathematically adept will follow Conway’s cheerful discourses into Leech lattices, the Lexicode, or assorted strange sequences, but most readers will enjoy the experience, learn a great deal, and share Roberts’s admiration. Agent: the Michelle Tessler Agency.

May 15, 2015
A biography of the brilliant mathematician John Horton Conway (b. 1937). Roberts (Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering, 2012, etc.) met her subject when he helped vet a manuscript of her award-winning earlier work, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry (2006). Now a distinguished professor of applied and computational mathematics at Princeton and a fellow of the Royal Society of London, Conway got his start at Cambridge, where he first achieved fame for his invention of the Game of Life in 1970. The "game" is now incorporated into computer programs that explore the possibilities of simulating human cognition and the potentialities of artificial intelligence and self-reproducing robots. Initially, participants played the game by manipulating stones on a square grid. At Conway's instigation, a group of Cambridge friends joined him in investigating the possibility of starting with two groups of colored stones (one representing live cells and the others, dead cells). The aim was to observe how, by moving them according to a few simple rules, they might evolve into complex structures, depending on the initial configuration and the rules. The game gained popularity when Conway's friend Martin Gardner wrote about it in his Scientific American column. With the development of computer capabilities, it has proved to have important scientific applications in simulating the behavior of self-organizing systems in various fields, including population studies and artificial intelligence. The emergence of unexpected patterns provides an analogy for evolution. In the appendices, the author describes some of Conway's other contributions in applied mathematics, including the invention of new numbers that he named "surreal." While he was becoming famous as a mathematician, Conway was cultivating an over-the-top personal style as a campus eccentric with an unconventional lecturing style. The book is enlivened by anecdotes provided by family, colleagues, and friends. While nonmathematicians may have trouble comprehending Roberts' mathematical achievements, they will enjoy this entertaining portrait of a charismatic genius.

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Starred review from June 1, 2015
Famous for pioneering a dozen branches of mathematics, the British-born Princeton professor John Horton Conway interprets life with disarming candor: I'm confused at various times. In fact, I'm confused at all times. It's a permanent state. Yet in this engrossing biography, readers see this genius repeatedly turn perplexities into breakthroughs. As Roberts has already shown in her prizewinning biography of geometer Donald Coxeter, she can elucidate mathematical conundrums for general readers, demonstrating her skills here by explaining in nontechnical terms how illuminating confusion can become when Conway probes symmetry groups, plumbs quantum free will, and formulates his Monstrous Moonshine Conjecture. Roberts even escorts readers into a momentous meeting between Conway and the iconic logician Kurt Godel, where surreal numbers spend 10 minutes suspended in infinity. Yet the personality that emerges from this freewheeling narrative responds to even deep confusion with an irresistible playfulness, manifest most remarkably in the Game of Life that Conway developed to give theoreticians fresh insights into how the cosmos evolves. To be sure, free-spirited playfulness has so tangled Conway's personal life that he once attempted suicide. But luminous episodes outnumber dark ones in this chronicle of invincible confusion. Who, after all, can resist a prodigy who devoted adolescence to mastering tongue contortions?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)