John Conway: All Play and No Work For a Genius 55
An anonymous reader points out Quanta's spotlight piece on mathematician John Conway, whose best known mathematical contribution is probably his "Game of Life," which has inspired many a screensaver and more than a few computer science careers. From the article: Based at Princeton University, though he found fame at Cambridge (as a student and professor from 1957 to 1987), John Horton 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's John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). He's a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is roundly praised as a genius. "The word 'genius' gets misused an awful lot," said Persi Diaconis, a mathematician at Stanford University. "John Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he'll think about anything. He has a real sense of whimsy. You can't put him in a mathematical box."
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Yes, lets all hail the mathematical achievements of 'Sexconker' instead, rofl.
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Yes, lets all hail the mathematical achievements of 'Sexconker' instead, rofl.
Indeed!
Did you see Sexconkers recent mathematical publication "Game Theory, Trolling and Mockery"? It's well worth a read.
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Ahhhh, baseless mockery. Where would the loser's ego be without it?
"never to have worked a day in his life," ... (Score:3, Interesting)
while developers in the US work seven days a week without vacation time. In the little over thirty years since I graduated UNC, I've only had a single contiguous week off. I manage a team of about forty architects and sixty developers, and I know none of them have had an entire week off since I got this job in 2007. We've all worked months at a time doing "hundreds" (16 hours a day weekdays plus about ten hours a day on weekends) to make a release. I need to find one of those jobs where you get paid for not working. I'm sick of this industry and how it is most economical to work developers to near death. In a normal eight hour work day, probably only a 1/3 of it can be dedicated to coding for the average dev position. If you can work a developer sixteen hours a day, then that mean instead of only being productive 2 2/3 hours (1/3 of 8) per day, you can be productive 10 2/3 hours a day. Fred Brooks figured that out over forty years ago then published The Mythical Man-Month. You can't add developers to a project to get it done faster. By forcing developers to work sixteen hour days, they have four times as much time to do coding. Yes, the pay is great, but the job takes its toil.
Re:"never to have worked a day in his life," ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, that's an illegal working environment.
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And you would be wrong. In most European countries there's a limit to how many hours a week and how many days a year you can work. Forced vacation is a thing in my country.
Have you ev
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Trust me, your employer will be hurt more for not complying - especially if YOU can prove they're not complying, or you were sacked because you tried to make them comply. This is what employment law is for. To protect both the employer and the employee.
My boss has been on at me since June - I have two week's paid leave to take before September. I took one week, and an extra day. They aren't happy. But because of the timing, there was nothing they could do about it. They aren't CLOSE to the legal minim
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Seriously - try living elsewhere.
http://cheezburger.com/4372082... [cheezburger.com]
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I'm the GP, and I'm an American living in France. As all online economics discussions go, let's have a reduction to something overly simplistic, shall we? Let's say you have a job splitting wood. Big pile of wood.
- in the US, they hire you to split X amount of wood, and if you succeed, you get a good paycheck. If you fail, you get fired, and unemployment benefits are lousy. Hence, you work your ass off, and to hell with how many hours it takes.
- in France, they hire you to work for Y amount of hours, a
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Never retire? Where do you think your first job came from?
You seem to assume there is a fixed number of jobs that never changes. Do you really think there were billions of jobs billions of years ago? Or maybe you think there will only be billions of jobs billions of years from now.
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I live in Norway where we definitely work to live, not the opposite, but I did spend one year in the US back in 1991-92.
During that year I know that I worked the least number of hours of any of the engineers in my department, averaging 45 hours/week, but I still got a couple of bonuses which they really didn't need to give me, since they knew that I was going back to Oslo after 12 months.
Here in Norway we have 5 weeks of vacation time every year, and employers get in big trouble if they have any employees w
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I've never understood people who complain about working a lot of hours. ...... I work a lot of hours, and I am paid well to do it. ........ I'd wager I am paid considerably more than than people in Europe who take months of vacation time.
But what is the point if you do not have the time to "enjoy" that money?
Despite living in the UK I actually have quite a lot of money earned from a middling profession career, and I would find it hard to spend it all. I already live where I want to live. I have a 10 year old car that I prefer to more recent models. I do all my own car and house maintenance because I enjoy doing it, like a hobby (one reason why I now have quite a lot of money). This PC has bits up to 15 years old and works fine. I do
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In the US where do your kids go for a holiday? Do they go without their dad or mum? That just sounds...sad.
Re: "never to have worked a day in his life," ... (Score:1)
You bastard. Give them a break mr. Manager.
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No, you need to find something that you're good enough at doing that you can complete sufficiently valuable work in a reasonable time. Clearly, your current work is not something that you're good at, and you need to do something more suited to your actual skills, not to what it says on your CV.
substituting hours for skill is never a good trade off.
A character indeed (Score:5, Informative)
I came to the same conclusion about him as well after having seen [youtube.com] him in some of [youtube.com] the Numberphile videos [youtube.com] on youtube.
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> John Conway is a genius...
John Thompson, himself a genius by most any measure, once told me that Conway had "the fastest brain west of the Urals."
I knew him as a research student in Cantab. He was the best teacher I knew, and at the same time, the most eccentric. He's the demonstration that all our theories about pedagogy are not nearly complete enough.
A genius for sure (Score:4, Insightful)
Conway was my supervisor at Cambridge in the late '60s. I can still recall his telling me about the Game of Life and the estimate that $1million of computer time had been wasted the previous year "playing" it.
He also pointed out the multiplication table of his group: a fanfold listing that reached around the four walls of his office. When I expressed the thought that it looked a little small for so large a group he exclaimed "oh, well each symbol stands for a 100x100 matrix".
As for surreal numbers.....
I have always said he is probably the only genius I have ever met.
Having said which, he was a LOUSY teacher, because he could never understand why anyone found anything (mathematical) difficult: "just think of a determinant as a volume transform from one vector space to another".
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What a strange comment from someone who studied maths in Cantab.
If you think of a determinant as "a volume transform from one vector space to another" then all its important properties are obvious: det = large positive means "expanded" while det = small positive means "shrunk." Det = 1 means "pushed around maybe, but not really expanded or contracted", det = -1 means "flipped inside out", det = zero means "dimensions shrunk so you cannot invert the process", and so on.
All Play and No Work (Score:1)
Yes, I'm sure his genius comes from playing around all the time. From being a Cambridge student, of maths no less - the biggest group of slackers if there ever was one - to a productive professorship, a Princeton chair, and multiple fellowships. Wow, what a player.
I can either conclude that Conway has always devoted his time to work that was thoroughly enjoyable, or that news standards have degenerated considerably to appease pretentious slackers. Or both.
My first grade school computer program in 1970 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
But he has worked for at least one day in his life (Score:5, Interesting)
Symmetry and the Monster - Gresham College [gresham.ac.uk]
An example of one [simple group] that was discovered using geometry is the Leech lattice. John Leech constructed a remarkable lattice in 24 dimensions. ... This lattice was absolutely brilliant. He [Leech] constructed it using Mathieu's largest group of permutations, and then he hawked this lattice around to a number of mathematicians, trying to get them to work on the symmetry group of the lattice.
John Conway took this up. Now, Conway is a big name in mathematics, but at that time he wasn't well-known. He had a wife and four children, so he was a fairly busy man. He said to his wife, 'Look, this is really exciting - I really think this lattice is worth looking into. I have to have some time on my own to do it.' So they had an agreement that he would have from Wednesday 6pm to midnight, and Saturday midday to midnight. So on the first Saturday, he got himself all set to work on this. He took an enormous sheet of paper, a great long roll of paper, and started to write down everything he knew about the Leech Lattice. He worked and worked, and after about six hours of this, he finally decided he was getting somewhere. He was quite excited, and he picked up the phone and talked to John Thompson, because Conway and Thompson were both at Cambridge University.
He [Conway] said, 'Look John, I think that the size of the group is either this number or it's half of that number.'
Thompson said, 'I will think about it and call you back.' Twenty minutes later, Thompson called back and said, 'It's half that number!'
He [Thompson?] said, 'But have you really got it?'
He [Conway] said, 'No, but I need to find one new symmetry that we don't already know about.'
So he got terribly excited and he worked, and then by about ten o'clock he phoned Thompson again, and he said, 'I've got it!'
Thompson said, 'Well, that's great.'
And he [Conway] said, 'I'm going to bed now - I'm really tired.'
Then he thought, well, it is pretty stupid to go to bed, because I haven't actually got it; I have almost got it, but not yet! So he stayed up until after midnight, and then he rang Thompson one last time and said, 'I've got it,' and the next day, they worked together on studying this fascinating group of symmetries. At any rate, it was a wonderful group of symmetries 'very important, and it contains most of the other ones that were known at that time.