A playful biography of one of the most creative mathematicians of modern times.

Both the title and sub-title are plays on words, which I’m sure Conway himself enjoyed. He is seen here as a genius playing with ideas, but his genius manifested itself through games, of which he was a prolific inventor; he was curious about everything he encountered, but was also unusual in the ways in which his mind approached challenges and indeed in what he saw as challenges.

It’s hard to read that Conway ended up hating his best-known invention, the Game of Life, when it’s been so influential on mathematicians, computer scientists, and the public at large. He saw it as the least amongst his discoveries, and indeed that’s an opinion that’s hard to fault: his discoveries in number theory, group theory, game theory, and other fields have been hugely influential, and each alone would have justified his fame. But they were also so technical as to be confined to a narrow group of specialists even within those specialist fields, whereas Life has achieved a life of its own in the popular imagination, it’s only real rival being the Mandelbrot set.

The Conway who emerges here would, I think, have been enormous fun to know and talk with – as long as you didn’t actually have to work with him or get anything from him, in which case he would be a frustrating and unpredictable collaborator. His several books were written with collaborators who needed patience to deal with him and get him to finish his commitments: they probably only hung-in with him because of a determination to give him the credit he was due. (It’s interesting that two collaborators once dealt with this by removing him as a co-author and instead putting his name in the paper’s title!) He was similarly unpredictable as a speaker, sometimes incredbly charismatic and sometimes failing terribly due to lack of preparation: never a sighn of someone who cares about their audience, although he clearly did care desperately, at least sometimes.

Conway’s was a talent that the scientific world needs, not content to stay with a single field but contributing widely and thereby bringing his wider expertise to bear on problems that might otherwise have remained unexplored. There’s a confidence in such an approach that’s sometimes hard to summon-up in today’s academia, which rewards increasigly incremental contributions of increasingly narrow depth. Conway was aware of this, but chose (or felt compelled by his own nature) to ignore it, and that’s admirable in itself.

4/5. Finished Saturday 10 May, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)