John H. Conway

John Conway
Born	John Horton Conway (1937-12-26) 26 December 1937 (age 79) Liverpool, Lancashire, England
Residence	United States
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Princeton University
Alma mater	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, MA, DPhil)
Thesis	Homogeneous ordered sets (1964)
Doctoral advisor	Harold Davenport
Doctoral students	Richard Borcherds Simon Norton Robert Wilson
Known for	Surreal numbers Conway groups Monstrous moonshine Doomsday algorithm Look-and-say sequence Icosians Mathieu groupoid Free will theorem Conway chained arrow notation Conway criterion Conway notation (knot theory) Conway polyhedron notation ATLAS of Finite Groups Conway's Game of Life
Notable awards	Berwick Prize (1971) Fellow of the Royal Society (1981) Pólya Prize (1987) Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) Leroy P. Steele Prize (2000)
Website math.princeton.edu/directory/john-conway

John Horton Conway FRS (/ˈkɒnweɪ/; born 26 December 1937) is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Conway is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Conway was born in Liverpool, the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age; his mother has recalled that he could recite the powers of two when he was four years old. By 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. Conway, who was a "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, interpreted his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into a new person: an "extrovert".

He was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree 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 the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, 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.

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