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.

Bourbaki’s abstract approach to mathematics must have appalled Conway who, for all his brilliance, often made little mistakes of great consequences, such as inverting the plus and minus signs. He once poured his cup over the coffee spill he had just made because he was thinking that more, not less, coffee...