His friend Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, called the Game of Life Conway's"most famous brainchild". He reckoned that at the game's peak of popularity — with users programming it at home and at work — one quarter of the world's computers were playing it.
One of Mr Conway's favorite accomplishments was the Free Will Theorem, conceptualised casually over the course of a decade with his friend and fellow Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen and first published in 2006 . "But then there are the magical geniuses," he added."Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John — he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius."
As a student, Mr Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work. He could be easily distracted by what he called"nerdish delights". He once went on a flexagon binge, courtesy of Mr Gardner, who described flexagons as"polygons, folded from straight or crooked strips of paper, which have the fascinating property of changing their faces when they are flexed".
At Princeton Mr Conway, with his mischievous and seductive aura, drew news media attention. Asked by a reporter forabout his life of the mind, he replied:"What happens most of the time is nothing. You just can't have ideas often."
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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