John Horton Conway is a singular mathematician with a rock star's charisma and a polymath's boundless curiosity--Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Richard Feynman all rolled into one. He also has a sly sense of humor and a burning desire to explain everything about the world to everyone in it.
Born in Liverpool in 1937, Conway discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and invented the aptly named surreal numbers as well as the cult classic Game of Life, which demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity, providing an analogy not only for mathematics but for the entire universe.
As a mathemagician at Princeton, he used cards, ropes, dice, coat hangers, and even the occasional Slinky as props to illustrate what was happening in his powerful brain. Conway granted Roberts full access to his idiosyncratic life and mind, though not without the occasional grumble: Oh hell, he'd say. You're not going to put that in the book. Are you?!?
