Thanks to the publisher & author of “Genius At Play,” anyone who signs up to host a Celebration of Mind event will be able to receive this book for 20% off at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any online partner retailer!
Be sure to hurry to sign up soon, this offer expires October 20, 2015!
Follow these instructions to receive the promotion code:
1) Register your 2015 event (even if you do not know the exact venue/time/etc, we allow you to put only your city, state and country!)
2) Email vky.g4g AT gmail DOT com with the subject line “Genius At Play”
We will verify that you’ve registered for 2015 and send you the promotional code.
(At this time, we’re still implementing our membership tools. We hope to make this process easier within the next few weeks.)
For more on Genius at Play:
An inadvertently authorized biography.
“Conway is a creative genius.”—Martin Gardner
Truly an unabashed original, John Horton Conway is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, and Richard Feynman all rolled into one—a singular mathematician, with a rock star’s charisma, a slyly bent sense of humor, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it.
Born in Liverpool in 1937, Conway found fame as a barefoot Cambridge professor. He discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and invented the aptly named surreal numbers, as well as the cult classic Game of Life. More than a cool fad, Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity; it provides an analogy for all mathematics and the entire universe.
Moving to Princeton in 1987, as a mathemagician of sorts Conway deployed cards, ropes, dice, coat hangers, and even the odd Slinky as props to extend his winning imagination and share his many obsessions with signature contagion. With his lovely loopy brain—deemed worthy of study by the neuroscientist who studied Einstein’s brain—he is a jet-setting ambassador-at-large for the beauties of all things mathematical, and all manner of nerdish delights.
Genius At Play is an intimate and unbuttoned investigation into the mind of an endearing genius, laying bare Conway’s professional and personal idiosyncrasies. The intimacy comes courtesy of the man himself. He generously granted Roberts full access, though not without the occasional grudge and grumble: “Oh hell,” he’d say. “You’re not going to put that in the book. Are you?!?”
Siobhan Roberts is a science writer and winner of four National Magazine Awards. While writing Genius At Play she was a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her first book, King of Infinite Space, won the Mathematical Association of America’s Euler Prize for expanding the public’s view of mathematics. She lives in Toronto.
Praise for Genius At Play
“Genius At Play is a portrait of one creative genius by another. Absolutely brilliant. Impossible to put down.” —Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and Grand Pursuit
“A delightful meta-biography—playful indeed—of a brilliant iconoclast.”—James Gleick, author of The Information and Chaos
“Wonderfully written, fascinating and hilarious, the book is a delight from beginning to end. Roberts has produced a captivating portrait of the most playful mathematician alive.”—Alex Bellos, author of Here’s Looking at Euclid and The Grapes of Math
“John Conway is, by any standard, a very remarkable man, and he well deserves a remarkable biography, which this book undoubtedly is.”—Roger Penrose, author of The Road to Reality and The Emperor’s New Mind
ISBN 978-1-62040-593-2 www.bloomsbury.com