Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway

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For curious minds who love genius untamed

This is the kind of biography that makes mathematics feel gloriously alive, not abstract or distant. Conway comes across as dazzling, mischievous, and deeply human, so even his wildest ideas feel inviting rather than intimidating. If you like books about brilliant eccentrics and the joy of thinking differently, this one feels like spending time inside a truly original mind.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway

Regular price RM44.00 MYR
Unit price
per
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ISBN: 9781620405932
Authors: Siobhan Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Date of Publication: 2015-07-14
Format: Hardcover
Related Collections: Science, History, Biographies & Memoirs
Goodreads rating: 3.96
(rated by 439 readers)

Description

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 "Oh hell," he’d say. "You’re not going to put that in the book. Are you?!?"
 

For curious minds who love genius untamed

This is the kind of biography that makes mathematics feel gloriously alive, not abstract or distant. Conway comes across as dazzling, mischievous, and deeply human, so even his wildest ideas feel inviting rather than intimidating. If you like books about brilliant eccentrics and the joy of thinking differently, this one feels like spending time inside a truly original mind.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.