15/04/2020

In Folha, Viana talks about his memories of John Conway.

O matemático John Conway. Foto: Thane Plambeck/ Flickr

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

British mathematician John Conway was one of the most original and charismatic of our time. He did remarkable research in different areas of mathematics, especially on finite groups, knots, codes and combinatorial games, and was a great popularizer of science.

I knew the names of the books, but I met the character in early 1994, on my first visit to Princeton University. I don't know if we ever spoke, but I remember him well in his office: always with the door open, surrounded by mathematical objects on the desks, on the walls, hanging from the ceiling.

I saw Conway again in the middle of that year in Zurich, at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians, where he gave one of the plenary lectures. He went up on stage with a pen, crossed out the title of the lecture on the transparency, and said something about changing the subject a little.

What followed was one of the most captivating presentations I have ever attended. The fact that a plenary session of Congress had been spent on "mere" popularizing mathematics scandalized some senior mathematicians, but most loved it.

Ten years later, we were both in Lisbon to give courses at the “New Talents in Mathematics” event, organized annually by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. At dinner, I commented to Conway how much I had appreciated the lecture in Zurich and the audacity of changing the topic at the last minute. I hadn't anticipated the response: “Months before the Congress, I attempted suicide. I was coming out of recovery and thought it would be good to go, but I didn't have the energy to talk about the other topic. I adjusted the title and spoke about something completely different.”

To change the subject, I mentioned how his work had gone beyond the walls of academia, particularly his invention of the Game of Life, which gave rise to numerous articles and computer programs. It's ideal for playing (alone) on a computer, but initially we played it on a sheet of paper. Published by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970, it made Conway a celebrity, more than he would have liked. I'll write about this game next week.

I did a good job in Lisbon, and the students followed my course with interest. But I couldn't compete with Conway, who gave five wonderful lectures on symmetry and the Magic Theorem, another topic to whose popularization he contributed greatly, with his unusual talent for popularization. Years later I tried to bring him to Brazil for the IMPA National Scientific Initiation Conference, but his schedule didn't allow it.

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.