John Horton Conway

Oh dear. I was really hoping to meet him one day, ...


At 5 minutes 33 seconds he bears out what I wrote here: How To Be A Genius and How To Be A Genius Part II. See Numberphile Playlist of Videos Featuring Conway.

Here's a Guardian piece from July 2015: John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician.
John Horton Conway is a cross between Archimedes, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí.
At 7 minutes 50 seconds this is true, in my experience! 😀💓 But just get him a plate of decent grub, and sit him down with a really good video about it, and he might be, ...

My favourite John Conway quote, which I heard in a lecture on the Free Will Theorem in Cambridge in 2007 or thereabouts:
The trouble is, I don't know what a random variable actually is!
The audience were not quite as lively as this lot at Princeton:


Conway knew about this: Ben Eater on Running a Breadboard at 1MHz. I hope he wrote something about it before he died.

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