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RIP John Conway. I asked him a lot of questions when I was a postdoc at Princeton and he always had a lengthy, deep, informative answer
which had nothing to do with my question
but I got real value out of every single one.
I remember a great lecture of his filled with his usual nonstandard fanciful notation for everything and then at one point he drew a cube and said, we call this a 'cube'
He seemed totally unprepared for but also pleased by the large wave of laughter that followed
The piece of math that for me most captures Conway's wonderfully individual style is his work on "audioactive decay" -- paper behind paywall but
here's someone else writing about it http://www.se16.info/mhi/Part1.htm
What makes it so Conway: a "normal" mathematician would see the question and say "There cannot possibly be any interesting mathematics here."
Conway, as he always did, said "Why not?"
