John Conway

John Horton Conway (born December 26, 1937, Liverpool, England) is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory.

Among amateur mathematicians, he is perhaps most widely known for his combinatorial game theory and for the invention of the game of life. He is also one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football, and he developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube. He came up with the still unsolved Angel problem.

He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation.

With Michael Guy, he established that there are 64 convex nonprismatic uniform polychora in the mid-1960s.

He worked on the classification of finite simple groups and discovered the Conway groups.

For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm.

Conway is currently professor of mathematics at Princeton University. He studied at Cambridge University. In 1981 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He has (co-)written several books including the Atlas of Finite Groups, The Sensual (Quadratic) Form, On Numbers and Games, Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and The Book of Numbers.

He is a dynamic professor who can swing a coathanger with a penny balanced on its tip around his finger while balancing a broom on his chin, although he claims that his age is getting in the way of the trick (April 2005).

See also

• Conway's LUX method for magic squares

External links and references

• O' Connor, Robertson, "John Horton Conway", MacTutor biography, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Conway.html
• Mark Alpert, "Not Just Fun and Games", Scientific American April 1999. online version