chalkdust
Significant figures
John Conway Thane Plambeck, CC BY 2.0
Jamie Handitye and Jakob Stein
M
y most memorable encounter with the work of late mathematician John Horton Conway came from a friend of mine I met as a first year graduate student. As we sat across from each other in the department common room, each having made little progress with our research, he slid me a piece of paper with five dots drawn on it. This game, he explained, consisted of us each taking turns to draw a line between any two dots, with the midpoint of the line we drew then counting as an additional dot. Although the lines could bend in any direction, they were not allowed to intersect each other, and each dot could join at most three line segments. The game was over when one player could not make any more moves, and the other player was declared the winner. At first, I was quickly defeated, and I spent quite some time trying to come up with the best strategies against my skilled opponent. The game that we spent our lunchtime playing was Sprouts, invented by Conway and his friend Michael Paterson during their time at the University of Cambridge, and was later popularised by Martin Gardner in his Scientific American column Mathematical Games. Conway is perhaps best known for his interest in games: he invented many, and his two books on the subject On numbers and games and Winning ways for mathematical plays include detailed analyses of many two-player games. He was a regular contributor to Gardnerβs column, and was a major figure in the world of recreational mathematics in his own right. chalkdustmagazine.com
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As a graduate student, Conway proved that every positive whole number can be written as the sum of at most 37 fifth powers.
