{"id":150685,"date":"2022-11-21T13:23:21","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T19:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/a-life-in-games"},"modified":"2022-11-21T13:23:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T19:23:21","slug":"a-life-in-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/a-life-in-games","title":{"rendered":"A Life in Games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1BXKsQ2nbno?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Gnawing on his left index finger with his chipped old British teeth, temporal veins bulging and brow pensively squinched beneath the day-before-yesterday\u2019s hair, the mathematician John Horton Conway unapologetically whiles away his hours tinkering and thinkering \u2014 which is to say he\u2019s ruminating, although he will insist he\u2019s doing nothing, being lazy, playing games.<\/p>\n<p>Based at Princeton University, though he found fame at Cambridge (as a student and professor from 1957 to 1987), Conway, 77, claims never to have worked a day in his life. Instead, he purports to have frittered away reams and reams of time playing. Yet he is Princeton\u2019s John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). He\u2019s a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is roundly praised as a genius. \u201cThe word \u2018genius\u2019 gets misused an awful lot,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/20150414-for-persi-diaconis-next-magic-trick\/\">Persi Diaconis, a mathematician at Stanford University<\/a>. \u201cJohn Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he\u2019ll think about anything.\u2026 He has a real sense of whimsy. You can\u2019t put him in a mathematical box.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gnawing on his left index finger with his chipped old British teeth, temporal veins bulging and brow pensively squinched beneath the day-before-yesterday\u2019s hair, the mathematician John Horton Conway unapologetically whiles away his hours tinkering and thinkering \u2014 which is to say he\u2019s ruminating, although he will insist he\u2019s doing nothing, being lazy, playing games. Based [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}