Biography
Conway's parents were Agnes Boyce and Cyril Horton Conway. He was born in Liverpool. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age and his mother recalled that he could recite the powers of two when he was four years old. At the age of eleven his ambition was to become a mathematician.
After leaving secondary school, Conway entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to study mathematics. He was awarded his BA in 1959 and began to undertake research in number theory supervised by Harold Davenport. Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying at Cambridge, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room. He was awarded his doctorate in 1964 and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
He left Cambridge in 1986 to take up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Conway resides in Princeton, New Jersey. He has seven children by various marriages, three grandchildren and four great-grand children. He has been married three times; his first wife was Eileen, and his second wife was Larissa. He has been married to his third wife, Diana, since 2001.
Read more about this topic: John Horton Conway
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)