John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician (2015) | Hacker News Reader

John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician (2015)

theguardian.com

118 pointsbenbreen19 comments

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.

Sounds like Richard Feynman :)

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! :)

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.

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

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

Are there any recordings? Great teachers are a rarity and I love watching lectures by good ones on youtube

> 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.

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

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

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoN... (5 videos totalling about 40 minutes)

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

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

>terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering

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

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.

Specially when they compare them to actual demigods such as "Archimedes".

In the real world, the hyper-productive & remarkably successful are often rewarded, while mundane participants don't get medals, snowflake.

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.

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.

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