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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 & #39;cube& #39;
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& #39;s wonderfully individual style is his work on "audioactive decay" -- paper behind paywall but
here& #39;s someone else writing about it http://www.se16.info/mhi/Part1.htm ">https://www.se16.info/mhi/Part1...
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?"
