Mind Games

Interviewed for Scientific American about Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway, the biography of his life authored by Canadian journalist Siobhan Roberts, the renowned mathematician reminisces about his encounter with the fabled French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki. This would have been a meeting of the minds. Bourbaki had been behind the “New Math” movement that briefly swept the American school system in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. Meant to bring the American mathematical curriculum on par with the Soviet one, the movement introduced school children to Boolean mathematics, set theory and other high-end mathematical concepts.

Games have made Conway famous—so much so that he is one of the few living mathematicians to have gained popular fame.

Bourbaki’s abstract approach to...