For Conway, games and mathematics were simply two sides of the same passion. His genius led him to numerous discoveries and achievements, "far deeper and more fundamental", according to his friend Peter Doyle. A look back at a brilliant career.
The rise of a prodigy
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John Conway was born in Liverpool, Great Britain, on the day after Christmas in 1937. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1959. Passionate about mathematics from childhood, he studied the subject under Harold Davenport, a specialist in algebraic number theory. There, he solved Waring's problem for fifth powers by proving that every integer can be written as the sum of at most thirty-seven fifth powers. However, the Chinese mathematician Chen Jingrun (1933–1996) proved the result independently (see Tangente 142, 2011) and published it before Conway. After earning his doctorate in 1964, Conway settled in Cambridge, where he remained until 1986.
