Siobhan Roberts is a science writer and winner of two National Magazine Awards. While writing this book, she was a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her first book, King of Infinite Space, won the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Prize for expanding the public's view of mathematics. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

“Conway is a creative genius.”—Martin Gardner

Born in Liverpool in 1937, John Horton Conway found fame as a Cambridge professor, making a pivotal contribution to the field of mathematical symmetry and inventing “surreal numbers.” A beloved teacher at Princeton University since 1987, he deploys cards, dice, coat hangers, and sometimes a Slinky as props to explain the beauties of mathematics. His myriad contributions to game theory, knot theory, number theory, coding theory, group theory, and geometry are legendary.

Conway is most celebrated for his 1970s cult classic “Game of Life.” One of the first cellular automata, the game plays out on a grid and is governed by three simple rules whereby proliferating cells resemble skittering microorganisms viewed under a microscope. More than just a cool fad, Life had broad cultural and scientific influence, showing how simplicity generates emergent complexity and providing an analogy not only for all mathematics but for the universe itself.

Science and mathematics writer Siobhan Roberts has had close access to Conway at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, to his colleagues, and to his family over several years. As a result, Genius At Play presents a unique and intimate portrait of the mind and work of perhaps the world's most acclaimed mathematician. Anyone interested in mathematics, in game playing, indeed, in genius itself, will find it unforgettable.

Inside the eccentric world of gifted polymath John Horton Conway, inventor of the Game of Life.