
John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician (2015) - benbreen
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-conway-the-most-charismatic-mathematician-in-the-world
======
noodles23
The most amazing fact about John Conway is that he actually enjoys teaching
(even to undergrads). Most profs of his calibre actively shy away from
teaching to focus on research. Having his energy and passion made linear
algebra fun. He was also always available for office hours and would happily
explain anything you didn't get which is also a rarity.

Top notch guy and an evangelist for the mathematics community. Really happy
he's getting the recognition he deserves.

~~~
johnfn
I watched a class (a single 2 hour lecture I believe) taught by Conway at
Mathcamp. It was about, believe it or not, the simple game of dots-and-boxes -
except that Conway had attacked it with a lot of math and derived some
strategies for winning. He was indeed a great lecturer, even though he was
quite old.

The most memorable part was right at the beginning where Conway asked someone
to play a 4x4 grid of dots and boxes with him 10 times in a row. As I
remember, Conway won 9 times in a row. That got all of our attention! :)

~~~
mrkgnao
I was a Mathcamper this year. One of the most common things people said to me
when I mentioned that I was a first-timer was that 2015 was the last year
Conway attended, and how sad it was that I'd miss his lectures and general
presence around camp. :(

There's this wonderful thing (invented by Conway) they do where, in a noisy
crowded assembly, one person raises their hand and stops making any sound.
Anyone who notices them raises their hand and stops talking. It works
extremeley well (and really quickly!), and I suspect it was Conway's general
frailty that led him to come up with this.

~~~
michaelcampbell
The Boy Scouts have been doing this for quite a long time - do you have any
citations of Conway's having invented this?

~~~
mrkgnao
Maybe he just introduced it to Mathcamp? We teenagers can be a bit quick to
make claims sometimes :)

------
visarga
> The students loved their new lecturer as much for his mind as his high
> jinks. He had a homely lecturing style, discussing abstract concepts in
> terms of trains and cars, cats and dogs. In lecturing on symmetry and the
> Platonic solids, he sometimes brought a large turnip and a carving knife to
> class, transforming the vegetable one slice at a time into an icosahedron
> with 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went.

We need a MOOC/at least a video with his lectures. Such rare professors are a
treasure of humanity.

~~~
cma
Here's one lecture series from his Free Will Theorem stuff:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIllWczf5w)

------
mrcactu5
John Conway has a very interesting theory of "tangles" where he associates a
continued fraction to a wide class of kntots

[http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/conway.pdf](http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/conway.pdf)

There is also the Conway Tesselation here he sub-divides a triangle into 5
equal pieces, and creates a non-periodic tiling this way

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_tiling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_tiling)

------
Davidp00
There were a few videos on numberphile with him. Here is a playlist:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoNAHseS-j1y-7V)
(5 videos totalling about 40 minutes)

~~~
vostok
I like that he's wearing an ARML shirt in at least two of those videos.

------
hd4
As I got into reading the article, I just knew he would the guy behind
Conway's Game of Life. And lo and behold..

------
joggery
>terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering

Self-awareness seems to be a key component of creativity.

------
kutkloon7
I really dislike this kind of articles who portray someone as a god. This
enstranges people, and this is not what fields like STEM need. At the same
time, it glorifies the few people who actually achieved something that is
noticed by the general public, while putting down the numereous hard-working
mathematicians who have not made contributions. In the end, a mathematician is
just a theorist which applies clever algebraic tricks.

~~~
rspeer
Estranges?! You must not be talking about John Conway.

This article honors a mathematician who is utterly devoted to teaching, whose
research focuses on making interesting mathematical results more accessible,
who can have a half-hour conversation with a middle or high schooler that
inspires them in STEM for years. This is the opposite of estrangement.

~~~
kutkloon7
No, I am talking about the guy who wrote the article. I appreciate the article
and its subject, I just dislike the tone. The 'mathematicians are
wizards'-attitude is hurting STEM, that is my point. I'm all for praising
mathematicians, but they should be praised for their work and cleverness, not
for their godlikeness. It is just pretentious bullshit.

